40 Fun Facts About The Van Gogh Deception

The publisher pitched The Van Gogh Deception as Dan Brown meeting which amnesiac spy of books and films?

Jason Bourne is the spy who wakes with no memory of who he is, the same fix the novel's young hero is in. Robert Ludlum created the character in 1980.

In The Van Gogh Deception, what do the kids spray at a kidnapper's stun gun to get away?

A shaken can of Coke does the job, one of several quick-thinking escapes Art and Camille improvise while a crew of trained operatives hunts them.

What do readers of The Van Gogh Deception scan with a phone to see the paintings named in the story?

QR codes are printed throughout the novel, each one opening a real artwork by van Gogh or another master at the moment the characters see it.

In which city does a boy with no memory turn up alone in an art museum in The Van Gogh Deception?

Washington, D.C. is the setting, and the chase that follows runs through the National Gallery of Art and the streets and landmarks around it.

Where does the boy with amnesia in The Van Gogh Deception find the name Art that he goes by?

Inside his jacket is the only clue he has, so Art becomes his name while everything else about his life stays blank.

Which part of his own body did Vincent van Gogh slash with a razor after a quarrel with a friend in 1888?

His left ear was the casualty of a furious row with a fellow painter, and van Gogh can be seen wearing the bandages in portraits he made just afterwards.

The gallery in The Van Gogh Deception has the only painting on public view in the Americas by which Renaissance master?

Leonardo da Vinci painted the portrait Ginevra de' Benci in Florence in the 1470s, and it has two faces: the back shows a juniper sprig inside a wreath.

Which Allied unit, the subject of a 2014 George Clooney film, tracked down art looted in the Second World War?

The Monuments Men were museum directors and curators in uniform, and in 1945 they chased an estimated 5 million stolen artworks and cultural items through more than 1,000 troves.

In The Van Gogh Deception, who is lined up to pay $183 million for the forged painting?

The gallery where Art is found is the mark: the crooks pass off their fake as a long-missing van Gogh, so the buyer and the scene of the chase are one and the same.

How does Art first come to know Camille, his partner in the chase, in The Van Gogh Deception?

Her family fosters him as an emergency placement while no one knows who he is, and ten-year-old Camille ends up sharing his whole escape.

Which criminal mastermind runs the scheme to sell a forged painting in The Van Gogh Deception?

Dorchek Palmer commands a team of highly skilled covert operatives, and chapters told from his side let readers watch the hunt for Art close in.

The mastermind behind the forgery in The Van Gogh Deception made his millions in which line of work?

Technology made him a millionaire developer, yet he leads a gang of covert criminal operatives bent on protecting a single sale.

What colour is the hair of Camille, the ten-year-old who helps Art in The Van Gogh Deception?

Red hair suits her: reviewers call Camille spunky, and the mystery only starts to come together once she and Art team up.

Which American author wrote The Van Gogh Deception, a mystery that begins in the National Gallery of Art?

Deron R. Hicks earned a fine arts degree in painting at the University of Georgia long before he wrote about forged masterpieces.

The Van Gogh Deception is the first book in which series of art-crime adventures for young readers?

The Lost Art Mysteries carry on from here: Art and Camille return to chase more art criminals in the later books of the series.

Which Old Master is named in the title of the 2020 sequel to The Van Gogh Deception?

Rembrandt gives The Rembrandt Conspiracy its name: Art and Camille suspect a plot to steal some of the world's most important portraits, and nobody believes them.

The author of The Van Gogh Deception earned a painting degree, then trained and worked as what?

Lawyer was his day job: after law school he spent years in private practice before a mystery idea for his own children made him a novelist.

Before The Van Gogh Deception, its author wrote two children's mysteries built around which English playwright?

William Shakespeare is the puzzle behind Secrets of Shakespeare's Grave and Tower of the Five Orders, the two novels that came before the art mysteries.

Where is an unidentified man fleeing pursuers in the opening scene of The Van Gogh Deception?

A parking garage is where the story starts, before the scene cuts to a boy of about twelve sitting alone on a gallery bench with no idea who he is.

Which van Gogh painting shows the view from his asylum window at Saint-Rémy, with a swirling sky over a village?

The Starry Night was painted by day in his ground-floor studio, and the village was invented: it could not be seen from his room.

Which brother, a Paris art dealer, supported Vincent van Gogh with money and materials for most of his career?

Theo sent monthly money and painting materials, and died just six months after Vincent; the two now lie side by side in the same French cemetery.

Which flowers did van Gogh paint in a famous series of still lifes to decorate a friend's bedroom in Arles?

Sunflowers were meant to impress Paul Gauguin, who was coming to stay, and Gauguin liked them enough to claim one of the canvases afterwards.

What colour was the house in Arles that van Gogh rented in 1888 and turned into the subject of a painting?

Yellow walls gave the house and the painting their name; van Gogh rented four rooms there, and a wartime bombing raid left it so damaged that it was demolished.

Which Nazi leader, commander of the Luftwaffe, filled his hunting lodge Carinhall with art plundered across Europe?

Hermann Göring hung his haul in a large gallery at the lodge, which he had built in memory of his first wife, Carin.

Which French painter of ballet dancers has work shown beside van Gogh's in The Van Gogh Deception?

Edgar Degas modelled Little Dancer Aged Fourteen in wax, and that 1881 original stands in the National Gallery of Art, where the novel begins.

How do the forgers' operatives cover their tracks across the city in The Van Gogh Deception?

Erasing security footage across the city is one of the lengths the crew goes to in order to protect the sale; kidnapping two children is another.

Which Pittsburgh banker and Treasury Secretary gave the art and the money that founded the National Gallery of Art?

Andrew W. Mellon offered his old master collection and the building funds in 1937, then died that August, only two months after excavation began.

Which architect of the Louvre's glass pyramid designed the angular East Building of the National Gallery of Art?

I. M. Pei split the awkward trapezoid site into two triangles, and his East Building opened in 1978, decades after the gallery's first home.

Forger Han van Meegeren fooled experts in 1937 with The Supper at Emmaus, a fake hailed as which master's best work?

Johannes Vermeer was the name on it, and van Meegeren admitted the truth only years later, when confessing to forgery was his way out of a far graver charge.

How is entry priced at the National Gallery of Art, the museum where The Van Gogh Deception begins?

It is free to enter both buildings, in keeping with a museum that was established in 1937 for the American people.

In which country was Vincent van Gogh born in 1853, the son of a Protestant minister?

Netherlands is right: he was born in the village of Groot-Zundert in North Brabant, though he painted his most famous pictures in France.

Which art movement, named by the critic Roger Fry, counts Vincent van Gogh among its leading painters?

Post-Impressionism was named years after his death: Fry put the term in the title of his 1910 London exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists.

Which imported artworks did van Gogh hang on his studio walls in Antwerp and collect by the hundred in Paris?

Japanese woodblock prints fascinated him, and he worked elements of their style into the backgrounds of some of his own paintings.

Before he took up painting, Vincent van Gogh worked as a missionary among coal miners in which country?

Belgium's coal-mining Borinage district was his posting in 1879, and church authorities dismissed him because he lived so humbly that they found it undignified.

What is the art-world term for an artwork's documented chain of owners, which experts check to expose fakes?

Provenance comes from a French verb meaning to come from, and a well-documented one helps show a work is not a forgery, stolen or looted.

In what kind of underground site at Altaussee in Austria did the Nazis store a huge hoard of stolen art?

A salt mine complex held the hoard from 1943 to 1945, with its deepest tunnels more than a mile inside the mountain and safe from enemy bombs.

What label did the Nazi regime give modern art it stripped from German museums and mocked in a 1937 Munich show?

Degenerate art was the regime's term, and over 5,000 works were seized under it, including pictures by Picasso, Chagall and Vincent van Gogh.

Which van Gogh painting of his doctor became the world's priciest picture at $82.5 million in 1990?

Portrait of Dr. Gachet went to a Japanese paper magnate, who alarmed the art world by saying he would have the canvas cremated with him.

Which German art dealer went on trial in 1932 for selling forged van Goghs he said came from a Russian collector?

Otto Wacker supplied 33 suspect canvases, and chemistry caught them out: the paint held a drying resin found in no genuine van Gogh.

Which dark early painting of peasants, made in Nuenen in 1885, did van Gogh still rate as his best two years later?

The Potato Eaters shows country people at their evening meal, and van Gogh told his sister that it was, after all, the best thing he had done.