The Van Gogh Deception
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
40 free The Van Gogh Deception trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Van Gogh Deception drops a boy with no memory into one of America's great museums and sends him running from people who know exactly who he is. He cannot say where he lives or who his parents are, yet he knows the history of painting inside out. This quiz follows the story and the real art world it borrows from. About half the questions cover the plot, the characters, the villains and the author. The rest look at Vincent van Gogh's life and paintings, the museum where the chase begins, famous forgers and wartime art theft. It suits readers who have just finished the novel, classes and book clubs reading it together, and anyone who enjoys a museum mystery. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The publisher pitched The Van Gogh Deception as Dan Brown meeting which amnesiac spy of books and films?
Jason Bourne
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.
Q 02In The Van Gogh Deception, what do the kids spray at a kidnapper's stun gun to get away?
A shaken can of Coke
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.
Q 03What do readers of The Van Gogh Deception scan with a phone to see the paintings named in the story?
QR codes
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.
Q 04In which city does a boy with no memory turn up alone in an art museum in The Van Gogh Deception?
Washington, D.C.
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.
Q 05Where does the boy with amnesia in The Van Gogh Deception find the name Art that he goes by?
Inside his jacket
Inside his jacket is the only clue he has, so Art becomes his name while everything else about his life stays blank.
Q 06Which part of his own body did Vincent van Gogh slash with a razor after a quarrel with a friend in 1888?
His left ear
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.
Q 07The gallery in The Van Gogh Deception has the only painting on public view in the Americas by which Renaissance master?
Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Q 08Which Allied unit, the subject of a 2014 George Clooney film, tracked down art looted in the Second World War?
The Monuments Men
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.
Q 09In The Van Gogh Deception, who is lined up to pay $183 million for the forged painting?
The gallery where Art is found
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.
Q 10How does Art first come to know Camille, his partner in the chase, in The Van Gogh Deception?
Her family fosters him
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.
Q 11Which criminal mastermind runs the scheme to sell a forged painting in The Van Gogh Deception?
Dorchek Palmer
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.
Q 12The mastermind behind the forgery in The Van Gogh Deception made his millions in which line of work?
Technology
Technology made him a millionaire developer, yet he leads a gang of covert criminal operatives bent on protecting a single sale.
Q 13What colour is the hair of Camille, the ten-year-old who helps Art in The Van Gogh Deception?
Red
Red hair suits her: reviewers call Camille spunky, and the mystery only starts to come together once she and Art team up.
Q 21Which brother, a Paris art dealer, supported Vincent van Gogh with money and materials for most of his career?
Theo
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.
Q 22Which flowers did van Gogh paint in a famous series of still lifes to decorate a friend's bedroom in Arles?
Sunflowers
Sunflowers were meant to impress Paul Gauguin, who was coming to stay, and Gauguin liked them enough to claim one of the canvases afterwards.
Q 23What colour was the house in Arles that van Gogh rented in 1888 and turned into the subject of a painting?
Yellow
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.
Q 14Which American author wrote The Van Gogh Deception, a mystery that begins in the National Gallery of Art?
Deron R. Hicks
Deron R. Hicks earned a fine arts degree in painting at the University of Georgia long before he wrote about forged masterpieces.
Q 15The Van Gogh Deception is the first book in which series of art-crime adventures for young readers?
The Lost Art Mysteries
The Lost Art Mysteries carry on from here: Art and Camille return to chase more art criminals in the later books of the series.
Q 16Which Old Master is named in the title of the 2020 sequel to The Van Gogh Deception?
Rembrandt
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.
Q 17The author of The Van Gogh Deception earned a painting degree, then trained and worked as what?
Lawyer
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.
Q 18Before The Van Gogh Deception, its author wrote two children's mysteries built around which English playwright?
William Shakespeare
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.
Q 19Where is an unidentified man fleeing pursuers in the opening scene of The Van Gogh Deception?
A parking garage
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.
Q 20Which van Gogh painting shows the view from his asylum window at Saint-Rémy, with a swirling sky over a village?
The Starry Night
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.
Q 24Which Nazi leader, commander of the Luftwaffe, filled his hunting lodge Carinhall with art plundered across Europe?
Hermann Göring
Hermann Göring hung his haul in a large gallery at the lodge, which he had built in memory of his first wife, Carin.
Q 25Which French painter of ballet dancers has work shown beside van Gogh's in The Van Gogh Deception?
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas modelled Little Dancer Aged Fourteen in wax, and that 1881 original stands in the National Gallery of Art, where the novel begins.
Q 26How do the forgers' operatives cover their tracks across the city in The Van Gogh Deception?
Erasing security footage
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.
Q 27Which Pittsburgh banker and Treasury Secretary gave the art and the money that founded the National Gallery of Art?
Andrew W. Mellon
Andrew W. Mellon offered his old master collection and the building funds in 1937, then died that August, only two months after excavation began.
Q 28Which architect of the Louvre's glass pyramid designed the angular East Building of the National Gallery of Art?
I. M. Pei
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.
Q 29Forger Han van Meegeren fooled experts in 1937 with The Supper at Emmaus, a fake hailed as which master's best work?
Johannes Vermeer
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.
Q 30How is entry priced at the National Gallery of Art, the museum where The Van Gogh Deception begins?
It is free
It is free to enter both buildings, in keeping with a museum that was established in 1937 for the American people.