“You see, the painting in the Metropolitan Museum from 1660 is incomplete. Hendrickje was already ill. She was dying. I imagine that Rembrandt couldn’t bear to finish it. One feels the tragedy, the sense of mortality. These are things I cannot overlook in the photograph of the painting. In my opinion, the lost painting should be placed close to 1660 with that of the Metropolitan Museum and not to 1658 with that of Berlin.”
[...] He stopped talking. With his eyes half-closed, he traced with his finger the outline of Hendrickje’s face in the photograph before him. “Yes, I believe the painting is by Rembrandt.”
Samuel Weinstock, a discerning art dealer and the owner of a small gallery in Boston, one day receives something incredible from a small-time intermediary: a lost, unknown work by Rembrandt, depicting a woman from the year 1660, when the great artist was painting his then partner, Hendrickje Stoffels, after the death of his beloved Saskia. Was there an extraordinary chance that it was real?
At the same time, Elton Ross, the director of a museum in Boston, is faced with a stunning ancient Greek vase, matching the beauty and artistry of the Exekias krater in Munich and the Euphronios krater in the Metropolitan Museum of New York; this has been secretly brought to him by a dark Armenian art dealer. The two stories intertwine, and a series of murders and disappearances begins.
Amos Hatcher, the detective-art historian and hero of Oliver Banks, makes a reappearance after the Mania with Caravaggio, and through police investigations, art history, meticulous academic researchers, specialized frame makers of the 17th century, and adventurous travels across Europe, he tries to find the threads that will lead him to the solution of the mystery.
The edition is accompanied by a note from the translator Andreas Apostolidis.
