In 1990, Japanese billionaire Ryoei Saito paid a record 82.5 million dollars at Christie's for Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet, then told the press he wanted it cremated with him. After his death in 1996, the painting disappeared into private hands, and today the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt displays only its empty frame. This episode reconstructs the biography of a single object that passed from a dying artist to a totalitarian regime to the vaults of hyper-capitalism.

We begin in the spring of 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, where a fragile Van Gogh, fresh from a year in an asylum, met homeopathic physician Paul Gachet, first dismissing him as more unstable than himself and then recognizing a mirror image. In roughly 70 days he painted more than 70 works. We decode the portrait's engineered melancholy, its ultramarine coat, red table, ye ...