Just then a private found a little kid covered with tablecloths behind some dishes in a sideboard cabinet. All blues and yellows and reddish brown, as translucent as lacquer. He says only that his father, "who always had a quick eye for fine art, picked it up, let us say, at an advantageous moment." Eventually it is revealed that Engelbrecht's father was a Nazi in charge of rounding up Dutch Jews for deportation and that the picture was looted from one doomed family's home: That's when I saw that painting, behind his head. He has, he claims, an authentic Vermeer painting, "a most extraordinary painting in which a young girl wearing a short blue smock over a rust-colored skirt sat in profile at a table by an open window." His colleague, an art teacher, is skeptical and though the technique and subject matter are persuasively Vermeer-like, Engelbrecht can offer no hard evidence-no appraisal, no papers-to support his claim. The story begins at a private boys' academy in Pennsylvania where, in the wake of a faculty member's unexpected death, math teacher Cornelius Engelbrecht makes a surprising revelation to one of his colleagues. In Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland posits the existence of a 36th. There are only 35 known Vermeers extant in the world today.
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