ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank Tony Lyons, CEO of Skyhorse Publishing, for his passion and commitment to bringing books that are off center to the public; thanks are also due to Louis Conte for taking the risk of introducing this material in a field he wasn’t familiar with but has now come to look at in a different way, and to my Skyhorse editors for their dedication, eye for detail, and questions that brought out the best in this author.

I am grateful to art experts R. Alexander Boyle, who pointed out the physical differences between Vincent van Gogh’s paintings created in the South of France and the rest of his oeuvre from all points north; Benoit Landais for his dedication and expertise in identifying thirty-two likely van Gogh forgeries and tirelessly challenging museum curators and private collectors on authenticity and provenance issues (he is putting those case studies on his platform, www.vincentsite.com); and J. L. “Louis” van Tilborgh, art expert at the Van Gogh Museum in Holland, who helped identify the artist’s “missing fingerprints” in style, paint type, and brushstrokes.

I am much obliged to the National Gallery in London and the team behind the 1987 “Technical Bulletin” on van Gogh’s A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, as well as to Chris Riopelle, Curator of Post 1800 Paintings, for his thirteenth-hour research into the painting’s provenance; to the Van Gogh Museum in Holland and its upkeep of the rich Van Gogh Letters online database; to Michele Willens, Senior Archivist in Gallery Archives, and her staff at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; to van Gogh expert Susie Alyson Stein and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for challenging my position; and to Susan Anderson, the Martha Hamilton Morris Archivist, and Margaret Huang, Digital Archivist, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

My thanks also to the heirs of classical composer Felix Mendelssohn, Dr. Julius H. Schoeps, director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam and managing director of the Moses Mendelssohn Foundation, and songwriter Elise Witt.

Finally, I am also grateful to Evelyn Campos for her detailed edits and eye for organization that helped me meet critical deadlines; and to Michael Cane, an old high school friend, who introduced me to Alex Boyle—an encounter that got the ball rolling after he answered one simple question: “Are there any fake van Goghs out there?”