Page 20 of The Collector
“Van Damme wished to utilize your services?”
Durand nodded.
“What was he after?”
“A Van Gogh.”
“Anything in particular?”
“Bedroom at Arles.”
“Which version?”
“The third.”
“The one at the Musée d’Orsay?”
“Abastille,” murmured Durand. “I told Van Damme the job was out of the question and suggested several other Van Goghs that were more readily attainable. When he ruled out those paintings, I suggestedSelf-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.”
“Which you had pinched from the Courtauld six years earlier.”
“Approximately.”
“On behalf of a client from the Arab world,” added Gabriel.
“The identity or nationality of the original buyer is of no consequence. All that matters is that I offered him a chance to sell the painting at a profit, and he agreed. Monsieur Van Damme was so pleased with the arrangement that a few months later he approached me with another commission.”
“What was he in the market for this time?”
“Dutch Golden Age.”
“But not just any Dutch Golden Age,” said Gabriel.
“Non. Van Damme wanted something specific. A genre piece, musical in nature, painted in the city of Delft in 1664.”
“Oil on canvas? Seventy-two-point-five by sixty-four-point-seven centimeters?”
“Oui,” said Maurice Durand. “The Concertby Johannes Vermeer.”
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For a few brief years, he enjoyed a certain modest celebrity, at least in his hometown. But by the autumn of 1672, with Holland locked in a protracted and economically ruinous war with France, he was no longer able to find buyers for his paintings. His death in December 1675 left his wife, Catharina Bolnes, and their eleven surviving children destitute. In a petition to her creditors, she declared that her husband’s inability to sell his work had plunged him “into a frenzy” and a state of “decay and decadence.” His end, she wrote, was swift. “In a day and a half he went from being alive to being dead.” She inherited nineteen of her husband’s paintings, more than half his oeuvre. She immediately sold two of the canvases, for the sum of 617 guilders, to the baker Hendrick van Buyten, to whom she owed a substantial debt.
A court-ordered inventory of his studio—it was located on the second floor of his mother-in-law’s spacious house on Oude Langendijk in Delft—listed two chairs, two easels, three palettes, ten canvases, a desk, an oaken table, and a cupboard filled with “rummage not worthy of being itemized.” The trustee’s document made no mention ofhis costly pigments, especially his beloved lapis lazuli, or the maulstick he used to steady his hand while painting. Also absent was any reference to a camera obscura or camera lucida, optical tools that some later scholars would insist he utilized.
Where he learned his craft—or even whether he was properly trained at all—is not known. Indeed, with few exceptions, the details of his brief life went with him to his grave in Delft’s Oude Kerk, where his coffin was laid atop those of three of his children who had died in infancy. Even the exact date of his birth in 1632 is unclear, though according to surviving Reform Church records he was baptized on October 31 and christened Joannis, perhaps because his parents found it more fetching than the conventional Jan. His father, an innkeeper and art dealer, was called Reijnier Janszoon Vos—Vos being the Dutch word for fox. Sometime around 1640, however, Reijnier began to refer to himself by a contraction of the surname Van der Meer, or “of the sea.” His son also took the name, which was Vermeer.
Within a few short years of his death, his reputation had fallen into such decline that Arnold Houbraken, in his indispensable 1718 anthology of the Dutch Golden Age, scarcely saw fit to mention him. But on May 22, 1822, a painting calledA View of Delftsold at auction in Amsterdam to a representative of the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, which was where, twenty years later, it caught the eye of Théophile Thoré-Bürger. So enchanted was the noted French journalist and art critic that he resolved to track down the artist’s surviving works and rescue him from obscurity. An 1866 essay—it was entitled “Van der Meer de Delft”—listed more than seventy potential paintings, though even Thoré-Bürger was convinced the actual number was perhaps forty-nine. Later scholars would whittle it down to just thirty-four.
Most were painted in one of two rooms in the house at OudeLangendijk and featured the same furniture and the same women as his models. He portrayed them as mistresses and maids, as writers and readers of letters, as drinkers of wine and makers of lace. And in 1665 he dressed a young woman in an exotic gown and turban and produced his masterpiece. The work would eventually derive its name from the girl’s large, pear-shaped earring. Whether it was actually a pearl is now a matter of some dispute, with at least one scholar suggesting it was likely fashioned of tin instead.
During that same period, he executed a musical scene that would become known asThe Concert. Precisely where the painting went when it left his studio is unclear, though it is widely assumed it was once in the collection of Pieter van Ruijven, his longtime patron. What is known for certain is that on December 5, 1892,The Concert, lot 31, oil on canvas, 72.5 by 64.7 centimeters, changed hands for 29,000 francs at the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris. The seller was none other than Théophile Thoré-Bürger; the buyer, a wealthy American heiress and art collector named Isabella Stewart Gardner. She took the painting to Boston and in 1903 placed it in a new museum she built in the city’s marshy Fenway area. Which is where it remained, in a room on the second floor, until the early-morning hours of Sunday, March 18, 1990, when it disappeared without a trace.
It was security guard Rick Abath, a Berklee School of Music dropout and keyboardist in a local rock band, who, at 1:24 a.m., unwittingly admitted the two thieves into the museum. Dressed in what appeared to be authentic Boston Police Department uniforms, they claimed to be investigating a disturbance in the neighborhood. Abath saw no reason to question their story. Nor did he find it suspicious when the shorter of the two men asked him to step away from the watch desk. The intruder immediately forced Abath against awall and cuffed his hands behind his back. Randy Hestand, who was working the overnight shift for the first time, was handcuffed a moment later, when he returned to the watch desk after making his rounds.
“Gentlemen,” announced one of the thieves, “this is a robbery.”
