In March 2025, art lover Fabrice Fourmanoir questioned the authenticity of a painting by Paul Gauguin in a message sent to the Kunstmuseum in Basel. After seven months of analysis and research, the museum has just confirmed that the Portrait of the Artist by Himself, dating from 1903, was authentic.
Fourmanoir’s thesis is that all of Gauguin’s paintings dating from 1903 are fake, the painter being so ill that he died on May 8, 1903. For him, this painting is a fake for several reasons: the eyes on the painting are blue while the painter had brown eyes, absence of signature or date, absence of reliable provenance. Finally, he invokes a letter from Gauguin from February 1903 saying that he had not painted for three months due to his illness, as well as the words of Ky-Dong’s son (real name Nguyen Van Cam), in the 1980s, a nurse and last friend of the artist, who would have received the painting at the time of his death, saying that Ky-Dong would have made false paintings.
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Portrait of the artist by himself1903, oil on canvas, 41 x 23 cm.
© Kunstmuseum Basel
The Basel museum decided to carry out comprehensive research on the painting, applying a multiple methodology. The painting passed UV, reflectographic and x-ray tests, which revealed that it had been subsequently retouched on the face. Chemical analyses, compared to those of other paintings by Gauguin, made it possible to find correlations across all painting and technique, with the exception of retouching. The latter were made with titanium white, available only after 1918, which dates the retouching between 1918 and 1924. The Gauguin committee of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute in Paris confirmed the authenticity of the painting which may have been produced with the help of Ky-Dong.
The painting was apparently given by Ky-Dong around 1905 to a Swiss merchant before being owned around 1923 by the Ormond family. The painting entered the museum collections by donation in 1945.
But Fourmanoir remains in his position and thinks that it is a forgery produced by Ky-Dong after Gauguin’s death, from a draft that the nurse had made. He could have used the painter’s materials and completed it around 1918, based on the fact that there is no evidence that the painting was painted in 1903 by Gauguin.
