The Van Gogh Deception

Throughout the course of his life, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) created more than 2,000 works of art, including an estimated 900 paintings.

He also wrote over 2,000 letters, with 651 of them addressed to his brother, Theo (“5 Things You Need to Know About Van Gogh’s Letters.” Van Gogh Museum). Theo encouraged and financially supported his older brother’s art career, and the two lived together briefly in Paris. Some of van Gogh’s most famous works are The Starry Night, Sunflowers, and Irises. In 2022, his painting Orchard with Cypresses sold for $117.2 million.

In The Van Gogh Deception, Art’s father, Art Hamilton Sr., is an authenticator who confirms that a van Gogh painting is a forgery. The novel’s premise is not far removed from history, as one of the most well-known cases of van Gogh forgeries involved Otto Wacker, an art dealer, who was found guilty of fraud in 1932 for 33 fake paintings. According to scholar Walter Feilchenfeldt, whose father exposed the scandal, Wacker had the paintings’ authenticity certified by experts but was not able to provide the records of its provenance (from whom and from where the work came). Wacker claimed a Russian buyer originally owned the works, but the van Gogh estate had no records of the sale.