Paul Gachet grew up surrounded by art and was exposed to, and influenced by some of the most famous artists of all time. 

His father was Dr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet (1828-1909) who was a friend and doctor to Pissarro, Van Gogh and Cézanne. As a doctor, Gachet Sr. could swap his homeopathic remedies for examples of their work. In his youth, Gachet Sr. hung out in Paris cafes with Courbet, Manet and Baudelaire. In 1872 he moved to the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, where his neighbor Pissarro introduced him to Cézanne and Armand Guillamin. He met Monet, Renoir and scores of others less known today.

Gachet Sr. was there when Cézanne sneered at Manet's masterful Olympia and dashed off his own version, A Modern Olympia (Sketch), saying it was "mere child's play." Gachet snatched it up and later lent it to the 1874 Impressionist exhibition, entering history as one of the first fans of the great proto-modernist.

Gachet Sr. tended Van Gogh in his last days, and even made several death-bed drawings of the artist. In the 1980s art boom, it was van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet that sold at auction for a record $82.5 million. 

But the tale doesn't end with Gachet Sr's death in 1909. For the next 40 years, the Gachet collection was kept hidden away by his daughter Marguerite (1869-1949) and son Paul (1873-1962), a reclusive scholar who spent most of his adult life writing a history of van Gogh's 70 super-productive days at Auvers. He is the likely artist who created this seascape. After Marguerite passed away, the collection eventually ended up in the Musée d'Orsay.

But there were further complications. Both Gachet père et fils were ardent amateur painters and copyists. For a time, the elder Gachet (who showed his paintings as Paul van Ryssel) worked side by side with Pissarro, Guillaumin and Cézanne in the attic of his Auvers house. In 1956, Gachet fils boasted of his close study of works in the family collection, "copying them so well that I dare write here, and for the first time, that without classes or lessons, I am at heart and soul, Paul Cézanne's student."

What's more, the good doctor had early on conceived a plan to publish a book on van Gogh, and enlisted several people to make copies of his work -- notably Blanche Derousse, the seamstress-daughter of a neighbor. She is responsible, for instance, for a copy of van Gogh's 1889 Self-Portrait -- in watercolor.

As a result, no one is quite sure who made some of the Gachet pictures. Especially since van Gogh seems to have made a few copies of his work himself. Even more interesting is the degree of difficulty, in our postmodernist age, of establishing esthetic superiority for some of these originals.

Never the less the Rysell works once thought of as plageristic in style, are now being appreciated for their aesthetics, even if they do not have the elite refinement of an original Van Goh's or Cezanne.