The Concert

Painted in the mid-1660s, The Concert shows three figures making music in a sunlit interior: a young woman seated at a harpsichord, a man with his back to us playing a lute, and a woman standing at the right holding a sheet of music and singing. A viola da gamba lies on the floor in the foreground, and a table covered with an oriental carpet separates the players from the viewer.

Music, love, and the pictures on the wall

Musical gatherings of this kind were a recognized seventeenth-century Dutch theme, an approved occasion for men and women to socialize, and the songbooks of the period dwell heavily on love, which lends the scene a romantic undertone. The two paintings on the back wall sharpen that reading. To the right hangs Dirck van Baburen’s The Procuress of about 1622, a ribald brothel scene whose presence hints at venal love; the same canvas, which belonged to Vermeer’s mother-in-law Maria Thins, reappears behind the figure in A Lady Seated at a Virginal. Above the harpsichordist is a rugged landscape, and the calm pastoral scene painted on the raised lid of the harpsichord plays against the wildness of that picture, leaving the overall mood deliberately ambiguous.

From the Théophile Thoré sale to Boston

Isabella Stewart Gardner bought the picture at the Paris sale of the critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger, the man who had done most to rediscover Vermeer, for about $5,000 in 1892, and it entered her Boston museum by her bequest.

Stolen in the Gardner heist

In the early hours of 18 March 1990, two thieves disguised as police officers talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made off with thirteen works, The Concert among them. None have been recovered, and with an estimated value of some $250 million The Concert is regarded as the most valuable unrecovered stolen painting in the world. In keeping with the terms of Gardner’s will, the museum has left the picture’s empty frame hanging in its place.