The Concert

The Concert is an oil painting on canvas by Johannes Vermeer, dated on grounds of style to the mid-1660s (roughly 1663–1666); it belonged to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston until it was stolen in 1990, and it is still missing.

Measuring 72.5 × 64.7 cm, the picture shows three musicians in a well-to-do interior with a black-and-white marble floor. A young woman in a yellow jacket sits at a harpsichord, a man with his back to us plays a lute and wears a sash with a sword, and a standing woman sings from a sheet of music; a viola da gamba lies on the floor. The harpsichord, the only one in Vermeer's work, has a painted Arcadian landscape on its lid and was probably a borrowed Flemish instrument, likely made by the Ruckers family of Antwerp.

Two pictures hang on the wall. At left is a wild landscape; at right is The Procuress by Dirck van Baburen, a painting that most likely belonged to Vermeer's mother-in-law, Maria Thins, and that reappears in his Lady Seated at a Virginal. Music in Dutch genre painting often hinted at love and seduction, and early critics even read the scene as a brothel, but the calm mood leaves the meaning open; the bawdy Baburen may serve as a contrast or a warning rather than a key.

The painting is first documented securely at an Amsterdam sale in 1780. It later belonged to the French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger, who did much to revive Vermeer's reputation, and at his sale in Paris in 1892 Isabella Stewart Gardner bought it for $5,000. On the night of 18 March 1990 thieves disguised as police officers took it with twelve other works from her museum. It has never resurfaced; its value has been estimated at US$250 million, and it is thought to be the most valuable stolen work still unrecovered.