Johannes Vermeer | The Concert

About The Concert by Johannes Vermeer

Vermeer painted The Concert around 1664. Three figures make music in a Delft interior: a woman seated at a harpsichord, a man with his back to us playing a lute, and a second woman standing, singing, one hand keeping time. Light comes from a window we cannot see. On the wall behind them hangs another painting — Dirck van Baburen's The Procuress, a picture Vermeer's mother-in-law actually owned, showing a brothel scene. Set against the decorum of the music-making, it quietly complicates everything.

You cannot go and look at it. In the early hours of 18 March 1990, two men in police uniforms talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, tied up the two guards, and spent 81 minutes removing thirteen works. The Concert was one of them. Nothing has ever been recovered, no one has been charged, and the case remains open with a US$10 million reward.

Under the terms of Isabella Stewart Gardner's will nothing in the museum may be rearranged, so the empty frames still hang exactly where the paintings were. The Concert is generally considered the most valuable stolen object in the world, estimated at around US$250 million. Only about 35 Vermeers exist, and this is the one nobody can see.

Own a hand-painted Concert

There is a particular reason that matters with this painting. The Concert has not been seen by anyone outside whoever holds it since 1990, and it may not survive at all. For every other Vermeer you can buy a plane ticket; for this one the object itself is simply absent from the world, and every image of it descends from photographs taken before the theft. A hand-painted reproduction in oils is the nearest thing to the picture that can actually exist right now — not a photograph of a lost painting, but paint on canvas, made the way the original was made. Given the alternative is an empty frame in Boston, that seems a reasonable thing for a wall to hold.