One Hundred Masterpieces

“One Hundred Masterpieces” was the first major exhibition mounted by the Boston Art Students Association, the predecessor to the Copley Society of Art, held at its Grundmann Studios on Clarendon Street from 5 to 28 March 1897. Among the hundred works on view was The Concert, catalogued as no. 98 under the title “The Muscians” (a misspelling carried into the printed catalogue) and lent by Mrs. John L. Gardner.

Gardner had acquired the picture just four years earlier, at the Paris sale of the critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger on 5 December 1892, where her agent Fernand Robert secured it as lot 31 for approximately $5,000. Thoré-Bürger had owned the painting since 1869 and was the scholar most responsible for rescuing Vermeer from obscurity. The loan to the 1897 exhibition was one of the earliest public showings of the picture in America, and the only recorded exhibition appearance of The Concert before its theft.

On 18 March 1990, two thieves posing as police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and stole thirteen works, including The Concert. None have been recovered. The Gardner Museum has left the empty frame in its place, and the painting is widely regarded as the most valuable unrecovered stolen artwork in the world.