Word: manet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Vermeer Concert is, well, a Vermeer: a sublime patch of silence and visual harmony washed in pearly light, one of only 32 known works by the master. The other "Rembrandt" painting, of a husband and wife, is probably by one of his pupils; the French works -- one by Manet and several by Degas -- vary from slight to trivial. It seems quite clear that the thieves had very little idea of what to go after, since the glory of the Gardner Museum is its Italian paintings, starting at the top with Titian's Rape of Europa, regarded by some...
...though nowhere near the ridiculously exaggerated figure of $200 million or so that was trumpeted all last week on the front pages and TV. The Vermeer could be worth $70 million, the Rembrandt seapiece $15 million and the rest a lot less: the five Degas being trivial and the Manet not much better. So why the inflation? It is a standard police technique to increase publicity and make fencing more difficult for the thieves, who are apt to get their notions of value from press reports. (If one fence will not pay, the reasoning goes, the villains will try others...