In 1930, a typeset book was published in Brussels in an edition of 850 copies. This volume, titled Le faux Van Gogh, detailed known 'fake' Van Goghs of the time. Dimensions and descriptions were supported by a wealth of black-and-white plates juxtaposing images of these 'fakes' with their 'original' counterparts.

Years ago, while in Antwerp, I splurged on a copy of my own after encountering it in an old bookstore, locked behind the loose-tracked sliding glass of a vitrine. There it was—central, aged olive green with aubergine cover text—flanked by a very old copy of Vico’s Scienza nuova (The new science) and a well-loved title on vanitas of the Dutch Baroque. Thumbing through the mold-speckled pages of Le faux Van Gogh, I couldn't help but giggle at the notion of indexing falsity.

Van Gogh was not only copied; he copied. Some unusual examples include his three oil paintings depicting enlarged compositions of Eisen and Hiroshige ukiyo-e woodblocks from the floating world in Edo Japan.

In his famed Sunflowers series from Arles, he copied compositions of his own. A pair was painted in 1888 to hang above Gauguin’s bed during his stay in the yellow house. Of the seven paintings in this series, two are initial studies. The remaining five consist of only two compositions. Today, you can see Van Gogh’s 'original' Sunflowers hanging in London’s National Gallery, in Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum or should you be in Tokyo you can find Van Gogh‘s ‘original’ painting Sunflowers at the Sompo Museum of Art.

The latter is frequently cited as a faux, though I don’t think it much matters. Sompo Japan Insurance Inc. purchased it from Christie’s London in 1987 for just shy of 40 million dollars. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam currently lists Sompo Japan Insurance Inc. as a founding partner, acknowledging its patronage in the realization of a new entrance hall.

All of these Sunflowers were created using an early synthetic pigment known as chrome yellow, which has a tendency to darken with exposure to light. Fascinatingly, when you stand in front of Van Gogh’s 'original' Sunflowers in London, Amsterdam, or Tokyo, you witness a dignified shade I would liken to French ochre, rather than the hot and hectic synthetic chrome yellow as it was freshly painted in La Belle Époque.

This evanescence of the synthetic is of perennial interest when reviewing artwork that blossomed in the eras of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism—and, really, ever since. Over time, our relationship with the synthetic has only deepened. Now that the cork is popped, synthesis flows, whether one thirsts for it or not.

This phenomenon is familiar today in the sun-bleaching of plastic bags, the aging of paints, the microplastics in your liver, and a mounting confidence that the world is no longer encountered, discovered, or unwrapped—but hurriedly invented. Advancements are made, and time trundles on.

Atop a small mountain in Southern California, on view at The Getty Center in Los Angeles, is Ultra-Violet: New Light on Van Gogh’s Irises. This exposé of one 'original' painting and a copy inspired by its 'original' appearance investigates Van Gogh’s use of the fugitive pigment geranium lake.

X-ray fluorescence (XRF) images show the blooms up close in nearly inverted color—like a limber deer through the night-vision crosshairs of a squinted sight. Given a century or more to bathe in the sun, an effervescent lake of geranium evaporates, and the blossoms, once violet, are now blue. Shortly after my visit last December, the internal threat that material composition poses to immutability was rivaled by the near-Pompeian instability of the external.

I am told that painting is a plastic art, characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color, or other medium to a solid matrix. Painted representations frequently outlive their subjects—the hardened oil eternally in bloom. These warped phantoms mirror what once was: a copy of something, sometime, somewhere.

It would seem that if vanitas was for the living and Edo was floating, surely, we are painted.

Samuel Farrier (b. 1989) is a New York-based artist and founder of The New York Board of Taste, a contextual archive in Lower Manhattan specializing in unlikely collaborations and small publishing. Farrier has been an artist-in-residence at The Elizabeth Foundation, New York (2017); Las Huertas, Cortez, CO (2019); and L’Apartmento, Naples, Italy (2022).

Select group exhibitions include: (Maria VMier) No: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin, Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany (2024); The flower thief, The Meeting, New York (2024); Fixture, Soloway, Brooklyn (2023); Mura Bellini, Taschino, Naples, Italy (2022); Rubus armeniacus, Jessica's Place, New York (2019); Superhuman, Fisher Parish, New York (2018); Hectare, Demain, Paris, France (2018); 36 hours, Particulier, New York (2017).