Girl Looking in a Mirror

Alfred Stevens built a career in Paris on this exact subject, a well-dressed woman alone in a comfortable room, absorbed in something small. The Van Gogh Museum dates this one to roughly 1875 to 1880. What is recorded almost month by month is what happened to it later. In April 1943 a dealer in The Hague sold the painting to a buyer in Berlin, and at the end of that December it was sold on to the Sonderauftrag Linz, the purchasing operation assembling a museum for Hitler in the Austrian town of Linz. Allied monuments officers found it in the salt mine at Altaussee in 1945, and it reached the collecting point in Munich that July. The Dutch state took it back in 1947, which is why the painting still carries an NK number, the prefix used for the Netherlands Art Property Collection of works recovered from Germany. It has hung in Amsterdam since 1991, on permanent loan since 2012.