Free The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick Page A

phone call, then returned to his guest and made a few remarks about vandalism and other dispiriting aspects of the modern world. Cahill gestured out the window to the street. “Now, d’ya see what I mean, just look out that window and look what those bloody vandals have done now.” The tax inspector’s car was in flames, burning like a bonfire.

    Cahill’s assault on Russborough House, a palatial mansion outside Dublin that housed one of the world’s greatest private art collections, was his first venture into art crime. The robbery was doubly tempting, for it allowed Cahill to indulge both his greed and his hatred of the upper crust. The house, with a façade stretching 700 feet, was, by some accounts, the handsomest in Ireland. Built in the eighteenth century for a prosperous Dublin brewer (later the first Earl of Milltown), Russborough House had since 1952 belonged to an English couple, Sir Alfred and Lady Beit.
    Sir Alfred had inherited a fortune—and a dazzling art collection—from an uncle who was one of the founders of the De Beers diamond company in South Africa. Lady Beit—Clementine Freeman-Mitford—occupied a high rank in the English pecking order and was a first cousin of the Mitford sisters, glamorous, aristocratic siblings (six altogether) notorious for their personal and political misadventures. The Beits had lived in South Africa for several years but had decided, in the early 1950s, to return to Britain. While flipping through the pages of Country Life magazine, Sir Alfred saw a photograph of Russborough House. He purchased the 100-room house without ever having seen it in person.
    In 1986 Sir Alfred announced a plan to donate 17 of the masterpieces of his collection to the National Gallery of Ireland. Cahill pricked up his ears. The opportunity to make a fortune for himself and to deprive the state of a gift it coveted set him to planning in earnest. Sir Alfred’s gift included Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid , a stunning painting that was by far the best, and the best-known, in the Beit collection. “Everything of Vermeer is in the Beit Letter,” one enraptured scholar had written.
    Lady Writing a Letter was one of only two Vermeers in private hands; the other belonged to Queen Elizabeth. The painting was valued at £20 million. (After Vermeer’s death, his widow had given it and a second of her husband’s works, Lady Playing a Guitar , to a baker in Delft to settle a debt. The Vermeers owed the baker 617 florins, just under $80 in today’s currency.)

    Vermeer, like Shakespeare, is a genius whose biography is almost completely unknown to us. (Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl with a Pearl Earring is a triumph of imagination that succeeds because of Chevalier’s artistry in building up a plausible world from a handful of scattered facts.) The little information we do have only deepens the mystery. The artist who created paintings that embody quiet and calm lived and worked in a house with 11 children (four others died in infancy). The house belonged to his mother-in-law, who lived there, too, and at first had opposed her daughter’s marriage. Amid the noise and bustle, Vermeer devised masterpieces that the historian E. H. Gombrich aptly described as “still lifes with human beings.”
    Vermeer’s professional life seemed no more likely than his domestic arrangements to promote serenity. At his peak Vermeer was one of Delft’s more successful artists, but painting never provided nearly enough to live on. Though many of his peers painted perhaps fifty works in the course of a year, Vermeer turned out only two or three. His work brought in about 200 guilders a year, about as much as a sailor’s pay. Throughout his life, he worked a second job, as an art dealer, and selling other people’s work proved far more profitable than selling his own.
    Late in life, Vermeer sank into debt. For the last three years of his life, he sold no paintings at all. He fell into “decay and