![]() Farther back still, a happily married Dutch couple owns the painting-and when the husband admits that the girl in it reminds him of an earlier lover, the marriage is briefly shaken (-Adagia-). Such reader-privilege becomes an overwhelming emotional test when Vreeland goes back to visit that family, in that year, just before the theft (-A Night Different From All Other Nights-). ![]() The reader is more privileged, though, and learns quickly enough that Engelbrecht’s Nazi father stole it in 1940 from a doomed Jewish family in Amsterdam. All the evidence-of technique, color, subject-is there, yet the painting lacks documentation to validate its authenticity: nor will the math teacher, one Cornelius Engelbrecht, tell just how it became his. ![]() The only wobble in this elegant little book is at the start, where a stiffness in character may be intended but jars even so: a high-school math teacher confides to a colleague that he owns (and adores) a painting-of a girl sewing at a window-that he knows is a Vermeer. Vreeland’s wonderful second outing (What Love Sees, 1996, not seen) is a novel made of stories, each delving farther into the provenance of a Vermeer painting, and each capturing a moment of life, much as the great painter did himself. ![]()
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