NOREETUH

      Katie showed up wearing gray slacks, a well-cut dark blazer and a burgundy turtleneck. Kevin O’Keefe was in a pin-striped suit, pale blue shirt with a white collar and polka-dotted bow tie that fit the standard image of his profession. His graying hair was slicked back, his nose patrician. Katie was buzzed into his office, where O’Keeffe was already standing up.
         “Excuse the mess,” he said, “The big New York Art Show on the Pier is coming up and we’re a madhouse at the moment. So, how can I help you, Ms. Cavuto?  The Vermeer sale, right?  Not something that our little gallery is likely to handle, alas.”
         “Do you mind if I record our conversation?” asked Katie, taking out her notebook and mini-recorder.  O’Keeffe just waved his hand.
         “I know how rare it is for a Vermeer to come on the market,” Katie said, “and how unique for it to be a painting no one’s ever heard about.”
         “Well, that’s not entirely true,” said O’Keeffe. “There’s long been an assumption that there had to be other Vermeers out there.  We know that twenty-one of his paintings were sold in one lot back in 1696, but we only know some of the paintings in that sale. For all we do know, there might well have been paintings that are not in the official catalogs of his work, paintings that have stayed in someone’s collection and never been seen.”
        “Is that likely?” asked Katie.
         “Not very. It’s more likely many, if not all, were dispersed to many buyers. As you may know, Vermeer was not a very popular artist for more than two hundred years after he died. But we really don’t know where a lot of them might be, if they still exist at all.”
         “But you believe there are still Vermeers out there no one has seen?”
         “That is indeed likely. It’s even possible that there are Vermeers hanging somewhere in a museum or private home that have not been officially declared to be Vermeers or attributed to other, lesser artists.  Every artist’s style changes from his youth to his maturity, and the few early Vermeers extant don’t look very much like his later work, though there are hints of the mastery to come. Those are the ones forgers paint.”
         Katie herself had wondered about some of the early Vermeers she’d seen in books, like the derivative Diana and The Nymph (above) and Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (right), while the odd, off-kilter composition of Girl Asleep hanging in the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art only hinted at the sublime style Vermeer would later develop.
         O’Keeffe went on: “There have been a few paintings attributed to Vermeer that were later discounted, and a slew of pre-war forgeries that fooled even the most erudite scholars. There’s one out there now that’s been debated back and forth for the last forty years.”
         “All right, so let’s say this new Vermeer—I believe it’s called The Chemist?—is the real McCoy.  Do you have any idea how much money it would bring at auction?”
         “Well, that depends on a number of factors: What condition is it in? Does it need to be cleaned, or wholly restored? The famous Vermeer that people call The Girl with the Pearl Earring in the Hague was just beautifully restored two years ago, and there’s a stunning difference in color, tone and texture that will have scholars busy re-thinking their estimates for years to come.
         “Now, if it is already in very good condition, the sky’s the limit with the way prices are going these days at auction. The market of Old Masters has never been more inflationary, and that’s trickled down to the contemporary artists, too, many of whom I represent. Of course, aside from its rarity, a Vermeer is an easy sell: His work looks good on collectors’ walls. Much better than a biblical painting of Judith holding up the head of Holofernes she’d just hacked off. Wouldn’t look good in the dining room.”
         “Not to seem crass,” said Katie, “but is it true that a van Gogh is the most expensive painting sold in this century?”
         “Here, let me show you,” said O’Keeffe, reaching for a large format volume on Vincent van Gogh and opening to a page with a tab in it.  “That is van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet (right), which he painted the year he died.”
         The painting showed a mustachioed man leaning on a table with books and a plant, his hair red, his face a bilious yellow-green, the whole of it painted in quick, small strokes whirling around the composition.
         “Van Gogh’s sister-in-law sold it for 300 francs after he died, then it was later acquired by a gallery in Frankfort, which hid it from the Nazis when they took power. But the Reich found it and confiscated it, listing it among what Hermann Goering called ‘degenerate art,’ so the fat fool sold it to a Parisian dealer who in turn sent it to New York, where a buyer lent it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a while. Then in 1990 it was put up for auction at Christie’s and bought by a Japanese tycoon named Saito (below) for $75 million plus a 10 percent commission, so it came to $82.5 million. 
         “Saito then shocked everyone when he said that he would be cremated with the painting, and you can imagine how that went over in the art world! Then he said he was just kidding. He also hinted that he’d give the painting to the Japanese government but he died just a few weeks ago and no one knows where in heaven’s name Dr. Gachet is. I’ve heard it might come up for auction this year, but who knows?”
         Katie was wagging her head. “Eighty-two five. And you think the Vermeer will go for more?”
       “Oh, absolutely. The history of the van Gogh painting had a lot going for it that distinguished it from other van Goghs, but the fact is, he painted 900 canvases; there are currently only thirty-four Vermeers.  If this is a thirty-fifth, you can only imagine what it might go for—certainly in excess of $100 million.”
         “Well, then,” said Katie, flipping closed her notebook and clicking off her recorder. “You’ve been very kind and I appreciate your time, especially during this busy week for you. Can I give you my card, and if you hear anything else about the Vermeer, give me a call?”
         “Absolutely,” said O’Keeffe. “My ear is to the ground.”
         Katie left the gallery and headed west to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue in order to get another look at the four Vermeers there, one, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, acquired in 1879, the rest in the 20th century, the last, Study of a Young Woman, in 1979.
         Next she crossed the street to see the three Vermeers at the Frick Collection, purchased by Henry Clay Frick between 1902 and 1919—A Soldier and Laughing Girl, The Music Lesson and A Mistress and Maidservant (right) .
   By then, Katie’s appreciation for Vermeer equaled her professional interest in the project she’d embarked upon. 
      She began to see the unique qualities of Vermeer’s mature style in the composition of a room suffused with light from a tall window and how a delicate quiet pervaded even those paintings, like The Music Lesson, in which there was more than one person. And, although she had never seen the famous Girl with the Pearl Earring, hung in The Maurishis museum at The Hague in the Netherlands since 1881, the similar cast of the eyes and smile of the Metropolitan’s Study of a Young Woman mesmerized Katie as no other painting ever had. 
      There was a story behind the strange girl’s eyes, a mystery more luminous than the smile of the Mona Lisa, some key to the man who painted her. For Katie, that young girl, not Vermeer himself, was the Sphinx of Delft, as serene as the moment she was caught in the soft light of Vermeer’s studio.