The Thoré-Bürger Sale

Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré (1807–1869) was a French republican journalist driven into exile after the revolution of 1848, who took the Dutch-sounding pseudonym William Bürger and turned to the study of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. His three-part essay of 1866 in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts was the first serious attempt to catalogue and account for Vermeer, and it lifted the painter out of near-total obscurity. Along the way Thoré gathered several Vermeers of his own.

The collection passed to the Lacroix family and was sold at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris on 5 December 1892, more than two decades after Thoré’s death. Its three keyboard pictures were the stars of the day. The two virginal paintings, A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal and A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, went by way of the dealers toward the National Gallery in London, while The Concert was bought for Isabella Stewart Gardner of Boston, her first major purchase abroad, whose agent outbid both the National Gallery and the Louvre.

Thoré’s enthusiasm came at a cost. His 1866 catalogue listed dozens of paintings as Vermeer, far more than the painter ever made, and many have since been reassigned to other hands such as Jacobus Vrel. A contemporary quipped that Bürger now saw Delft just about everywhere. He had earlier owned and sold the Woman with a Pearl Necklace at a Brussels sale in 1868, the picture passing toward Berlin. Even so, it was his eye that set the rediscovery of Vermeer in motion.