Paintings Worth Looking At

(Author’s note: This hefty chunk of research dates back to July, but was delayed. Certain materials are still absent. So the mystery's a bit inconclusive, but the rest is perfectly readable.) Let’s start with the theft. Or maybe it was a gift. It could’ve been a perfectly legitimate off-the-record sale, or a simple mishap. Maybe it simply fell off the wall, landed in someone’s pocket by mistake, and walked out on its own, with everyone else none the wiser. Who are we to say, centuries later? All we can say is that, from 1732 to 1915, the Anthony Van Dyck painting of Dr. Baldwin Hamey, Junior, disappeared from the record entirely. 

In which a mysterious floating head is reattached to a Dutch nobleman, and a grandson copies his grandfather to impersonate him postmortem. It started out, back then, as “Portrait That Has Something A Bit Off.”  This humble yet striking picture originally turned up on a stock photo website , uploaded — in the infinite wisdom of automatic titling — as “Man In Black Jacket Holding White Plastic Tube.”  It’s a mystery where a gentleman from 1648 in the Netherlands might have got hold of plastic.  So I stashed it in my digital notes, with the aforementioned label. There is something a bit off: it’s remarkably good. Despite the gap in centuries, the man feels relatable. He tiredly and wistfully gazes out of his frame, choked by his stifling starched ruff. (Some sitters wear the ruff. For other sitters, the ruff wears them.) Fashion aside, it’s clearly a picture of great quality. The execution is intricate, the brushwork precise, the fabric crisply and delicately rendered. The...