The Procuress

In November 1641, when Maria Thins of Delft separated from her husband, a list was drawn up to divide their property, and one entry reads, a painting of a procuress pointing in the hand. Many scholars have taken that line to mean this canvas. Maria Thins later became the mother-in-law of Johannes Vermeer, who lived in her house, and he painted Baburen's composition on the back wall of two of his own pictures. In his 2013 catalogue of Baburen's paintings the scholar Wayne Franits suggests the family may have owned a replica rather than this canvas, so the Boston museum says this painting or a copy of it. One of the two Vermeers, The Concert, hung in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a few minutes' walk away in Boston, until thieves took it in 1990, and it has not been recovered. The other is in the National Gallery in London. Baburen painted this in Utrecht in 1622, two years before his death. The hands do the talking, as the museum's label notes, while the client bargains with the old woman for the favours of the young lute player, the lute being a common emblem of love. The canvas passed through a London sale in 1949 and was bought for Boston the following year for 1,960 dollars.