NU-Q Professor Sam Meekings
DOHA: A new book by Northwestern University in Qatar Professor Sam Meekings uncovers the story behind a painting by Vincent van Gogh of his personal doctor, Paul Gachet. The book explores the history of Gachet’s life as well as the painting itself and brings nuance to this doctor’s melancholy character.
Meekings, an accomplished novelist and poet, is launching his new novel ‘The Afterlives of Doctor Gachet,’ at the London Review of Books Bookshop in Bloomsbury, as well as delivering a live reading and talk at Oxford University in the UK.
“It follows Dr Gachet’s life, from his work in asylums and cholera wards to the controversial exhibitions of the first Impressionists, from the battlefields of the Franco-Prussian war and its bloody aftermath in the Paris Commune, through to treating Van Gogh in Auvers,” said Meekings.
“This is the latest of Sam Meekings’s already distinguished roster of books that illuminate his talent as a story teller—and gift as a writer,” said Everette E. Dennis, dean and CEO.
Through historical fiction, Meekings explained that his book portrays similarities and differences in how people responded to depression over the last hundred years. “On the one hand it shows us what life was really like in different eras, cultures, and places, and on the other, it reminds us of how similar each of us is deep down in our longings, doubts, desires and goals,” said Meekings.
In the book, Meekings traces the journey of Van Gogh’s painting, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, from fashionable Parisian salons to the bunkers full of confiscated ‘degenerate’ art in Nazi Germany, and from refugees arriving in America to its mysterious disappearance with a reclusive billionaire in Tokyo.
