On the Track of Vermeer by E.V. Lucas — Read

Not long ago the papers contained a little paragraph stating that Herr Bredius, the curator of the Mauritshuis Gallery at the Hague, had just returned from a journey of exploration in Russia, bringing back with him over a hundred valuable pictures of the Dutch School which he had discovered there, in country and city mansions and even in farmhouses; for the Russian collectors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as is well known, greatly esteemed and desired (as who must not? ) Dutch art. That was all that the paragraph said, and since that was all we may feel quite sure that among those hundred and more pictures there was nothing from the divinely gifted hand of Jan Vermeer of Delft; because the discovery of a new picture by Jan Vermeer of Delft is something not merely for mention in a paragraph but among the special news -- something with which to agitate the cables of the world.

Can you conceive of a more delightful existence than that of Herr Bredius -- to be when at home the conservator of such masterpieces as hang in the Mauritshuis on the banks of the Vyver, in the beautiful and bland Dutch capital (some of which are his own property, and only lent to the gallery), and when in mind to travel, to leave the Hague with a roving commission to hunt and acquire new treasures? I can't. And that is why, when I am asked who I would choose to be were I not myself, I do not say the King, or Mr. Pierpont Morgan, but Herr Bredius of the Mauritshuis.