In 1990, Japanese billionaire Ryoei Saito paid a record 82.5 million dollars at Christie’s for Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet, then told the press he wanted it cremated with him. After his death in 1996, the painting disappeared into private hands, and today the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt displays only its empty frame. This episode reconstructs the biography of a single object that passed from a dying artist to a totalitarian regime to the vaults of hyper-capitalism.

We begin in the spring of 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, where a fragile Van Gogh, fresh from a year in an asylum, met homeopathic physician Paul Gachet, first dismissing him as more unstable than himself and then recognizing a mirror image. In roughly 70 days he painted more than 70 works. We decode the portrait’s engineered melancholy, its ultramarine coat, red table, yellow novels, and foxglove flower, then trace its sale for 300 francs in 1897, its confiscation by the Nazis as degenerate art in 1937, Hermann Goring’s decision to sell it for foreign currency, and its escape to New York with banker Siegfried Kramarsky.

• Why Camille Pissarro recommended Dr. Gachet and how the two men’s shared sorrow fueled a manic burst of painting
• How the Frankfurt museum hid the painting in a secret room from 1933 until it was discovered
• The second version at the Musee d’Orsay and why the missing yellow books raised suspicions of forgery
• How the Gachets’ hobby of copying Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Monet complicated the authentication
• What 1999 infrared reflectography and pigment analysis revealed about Van Gogh’s underdrawing and fading eosin red