Someone Is in the Dutch Room, by Cynthia Gralla

Someone Is in the Dutch Room

On March 18, 1990, two thieves tricked their way into the poorly guarded Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and tied up the night watchmen. In 81 minutes, they accomplished the biggest art heist in history, absconding with two Rembrandts and The Concert by Vermeer, now considered to be the most expensive missing painting in the world. They focused their efforts on the Dutch Room but plundered a few treasures from the Blue Room and the Short Gallery as well. The alarm system repeated the warning: Someone is in the Dutch Room.

Someone was.
 
The Concert, by Vermeer

A romance on canvas. 

The girl on the left attends the harpsichord’s cries. She’s in profile, her sleeves the colour of rapeseed. The folds of her silk skirt stiffen like sails. Above her seated figure, a painting-within-a-painting of untamed trees frames her cameo, carved from desire’s mottled bone.

To her right, the open harpsichord lid creates another quarter frame. Its painted landscape, as curved as an odalisque, makes nature diminutive, a Japanese garden midair.

The eye, catching the rhythm, moves to the man sitting next to the yellow-sleeved girl. His embroidered sash sparkles, a slice of night sky, echoed in his chair’s embellishments.

To his right, a girl stands, her face in full view but her eyes cast down. She holds a leaf of paper in her left hand, a sceptre of air in her right. Her dress shapes her into a bell, its blue long faded to grey, like us after the malnutrition of loss.

Don’t forget the draw-leaf table, the tiled floor refusing reflection, the Oriental carpet and cittern in shadows, and the viola de gamba in the dark foreground. Elements in concert. “Concert” in English stems from the Old Italian word for certainty, something decided. But this tableau merely suggests.

The second painting on the wall reproduces The Procuress, by Dirck Van Baburen. Its mise-en-abyme depicts another musical trio (a lute-playing whore, her customer, and the madam motioning for payment) in a more blatant erotic encounter. Their raucous melody can almost be heard. An aural tease.

Is the trio in this concert up to something naughty? Do they play for an audience, each other, or themselves? It’s as unknowable as light off a pearl, ultramarine added to the whitewashed walls, or shadows fashioned by a glaze. As the truth in the lee of the psyche.

What is known: intimacy can only be found in interiors, and in what we can hold in our hands. In the painting within a frame within a jewel box of a museum. 

Within this dollhouse scene, we can get close. Closer. Immanent. Just like a candlelit house brings stars to bed. 

But something happened. This inner room was rent from its dollhouse and sent out into the world. When this trio was lifted from the frame like a virgin stolen from her boudoir, their Sleeping-Beauty enchantment ended. 

All three came to life. 

Now, they play their silent song for all time, never arriving at its last bars. Again. Repeat. Tomorrow: the great joke. Set free from the museum, they’re imprisoned on a canvas, a postage-stamp jail. Their hearts break like tulips, time the crimson rift.

The yellow-sleeved girl just keeps her fingers on the harpsichord keys. This measure. This note.
 
Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, by Rembrandt

From where does the storm come? And where does it go? 

While painting, I only sensed when the storm was approaching. Not from east or west, but from chiaroscuro or impasto, smooth textures juxtaposed with rough. It came from within the work, its intemperate climes. Just as my brush made snowflakes of lace in other paintings, I atomized storm light above the Sea of Galilee, but only after it had already arrived.

I made annunciation visible in this ship pitched past point of no return. 

Catastrophe is reticent in our lives. We cling to its masts and vomit over the sides of our sinking boats, but it doesn’t even deign to speak our names. As I painted this scene, I imagined its dozen sailors pleading with Christ. Say it once. Aloud. My name heard on thrashing waters.

Today, a storm is engulfing us all. People blame human actions for the scratches in wet paint demarcating our seasons. For our lost glaciers and burning trees. Action and consequence are part of it, yes. But did art unleash it too? Can a painting call down God’s wrath and flame the poles? Set our forests on fire and our seas aslant?

Maybe, if my painting were found, if its Christ were found, we would all be saved.
 
The Bronze Beaker

We have favourites. Curators know their selections create a world. An experience. And sometimes, we select something that will barely be noticed by others. The quiet complement, as listening is to speech.   
                                              
The gu was over three thousand years old, a wine vessel from the Shang Dynasty. Compared to it, the other items in the Dutch room were babies. Yet the beaker was almost forgotten, an afterthought among paintings that glittered like jewels and cost a thousand kings’ ransoms. 

Still, seeing it in the room always set my heart at ease, a peace offering amidst sea storms and interpersonal dramas. Ancient. Eternally present.

Like a Chinese character, its part of speech fluctuated. Sometimes I saw it as a noun, a goblet, and sometimes as a verb, the drinking from it. 

When I pass through the room now, I notice an empty space where it once was, but there is no frame to mark it. Only a vibration, the echoes of a psalm. It simply was and now is not. 

Wherever it is now is its natural place.
 
Landscape with an Obelisk, by Flinck

For a long time, I was wanted for what I wasn’t.

People thought Rembrandt dreamt me, but I was birthed by a student who dreamt of being Rembrandt. The obelisk was Flinck’s divining rod for renown or, according to Egyptian myth, a petrified sunray, which is as good as any other metaphor for talent.

His fantasy is brushed in browns and greys, and the dark of memories with their sudden light through clouds. Travellers move and meet in the foreground, caravans of hope.

Paintings are gateways for all travellers: windows, portals. People peep through us and their eyes and spirits move. 

But over the years, I have budged and buckled. As I was removed from my frame. As I was passed through cold hands. As I was cut off, I was made whole.
Embodied.
Now, the searing light around the obelisk is my eyes, the tree on the right my limbs. The landscape that was once an enclosure is now my racing thoughts. 

I have followed where my tree points. I have rejected its present continuous tense, I am reaching. I’ve renounced the sky’s future anterior, I will have scattered with rain. I will have yawned with thunder. I’ve moved into the past before the painting was painted, to the unfathomable blackness of before we were born. I have made my choice.

I can never return.       
 
In the Dutch Room

In the spot where The Concert once hung, an empty frame regards visitors with a wallpapered eye.

Cynthia Gralla

Cynthia Gralla: "My books are The Floating World, a novel published by Ballantine, and The Demimonde in Japanese Literature: Sexuality and the Literary Karyukai, an academic monograph. My fiction and nonfiction have been featured in Best Canadian Essays 2026, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other publications. Currently, I teach literature, academic writing, and interdisciplinary writing at Royal Roads University and the University of Victoria. I love dancing Argentine tango, baking with edible flowers, Japanese literature, and fashion. When I was ten years old, I went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and admired the paintings that were stolen a few years later."