NEW YORK CITY — Vincent Van Gogh’s “Homme à la Pipe: Portrait du Docteur Gachet,” the artist’s only known etching, sold for $106,250, including buyer’s premium, at Swann Galleries’ March 5 Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Prints and Drawings sale. Printed in black on thin, cream laid paper, the 1890 work measures 7 by 5¾ inches.

This etching represents a time of great sadness and turmoil for Van Gogh. It would be completed only two months before the artist would end his life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.

Van Gogh was urged to see Dr Gachet following his one-year bout at an asylum in Saint-Rémy. Gachet was well-known to the artist community, an Impressionist art collector and amateur painter/printmaker himself. Gachet had also treated Camille Pissarro and was friends with Manet, Renoir and Cézanne.

Upon seeing Van Gogh’s etching, his brother and art dealer Theo Van Gogh called it “a true painter’s etching. No refinement in the execution, but a drawing on metal.”

For more information, www.swanngalleries.com or 212-254-4710.