ABSTRACT
When Van Gogh's Sunflowers was auctioned in April 1987 to a Japanese industrialist for $39,900,000 fuel was added to a growing concern that museums were being shut out of the art market. The prices fetched for works by Mantegna, Rembrandt, Manet, Turner and more recently Van Gogh have increasingly placed masterpieces further out of the reach of most museums. Three months after the sale of Sunflowers an anonymous telephone bidder acquired Van Gogh's Bridge of Trinquetaille for $20,200,000. Then in November 1987, John Payson retracted his longstanding ‘permanent loan’ of Van Gogh's Irises to the Joan Whitney Payson Memorial Art Gallery at Maine's Westbrooke College, to auction the painting for a staggering $53,900,000. Yet another Van Gogh, Portrait of Adeline Ravoux, completed what Van Gogh specialist Carol Zemel called the ‘Quadruple Crown’ (Zemel 1988: 88), when it fetched $13,750,000 on Christie's auction block. Three years later, and still expanding, the ‘Crown’ claimed yet another prize when Portrait of Dr Gachet was removed from permanent loan to the Metropolitan and auctioned at Christie's for $82,500,000.
