When the hammer fell on Vincent van Gogh’s Bridge at Arles (Pont de Langlois) on May 21, 1912, shock waves must have coursed through the auction house in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Closing at 16,000 guilders, the painting made more than five times its estimate.

Twenty-two years earlier, the troubled artist had shot himself in a field near Auvers, in France, thinking his art a failure. His posthumous reversal in fortune owes much to the woman behind the winning bid on that spring evening at the dawn of the 20th century: Helene Kröller-Müller.

Born in 1869 in Horst, Germany, to industrialist Wilhelm Müller and his wife, Emilie Neese, she had married in 1888 Dutchman Anton Kröller, who looked after the Rotterdam branch of her father’s business. A year later, Müller died and Kröller went

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