The Concert

This small painting, slightly more than two-feet square, was displayed back-to-back with Govaert Flinck’s “Landscape with Obelisk” on a small tabletop in the Gardner Museum’s magnificent Dutch Room. The Vermeer is generally considered the rarest and most valuable of the lost treasures — at least partly because so few of his paintings are known to exist. (The current consensus is 37, but some scholars still have doubts about the genuineness of three of them.) “The Concert” is characteristic of the artist and also a little uncharacteristic. At least nine other Vermeers include musical instruments, mostly in the hands of women. Yet only three other surviving Vermeers include three figures (one...View all