The Dutch Room Couple
after the Vermeer and Flinck stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990
By Robert Fillman
May 5, 2025
May 5, 2025
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For years, Landscape with an Obelisk
and The Concert did not speak. Instead they sat back-to-back in silence. Their ornately-carved French frames so nearly touching, the sexual tension seemed pleasure enough to sustain them all those nights spent longing by the Gothic windows: our Dutch Room couple content to have dinner for one. And what more could they ask for? When the museum opened its doors each day, the patrons would crowd on a side so they could ooh at the musical ménage a trois, ahh at the big-boned stone monument. The romance was in those breathy tones, the patience of their own varnished gaze. The two never realized they could have more from each other. Not until Flinck’s landscape was slashed from its frame, the gilt flower housing of the Vermeer forced to the ground, its masterpiece torn out. If only they could have admitted what they wanted all along was one chance to see the other’s face. But now it’s too late for any vows. They’re wed to a stretch of imagination. |
NOTE: On March 18, 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was subject to perhaps the most notorious art robbery in history. The Flinck and Vermeer have not been seen since.
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Robert Fillman is the author of The Melting Point (Broadstone Books, 2025), House Bird (Terrapin Books, 2022), and the chapbook, November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). His poems have appeared in such journals as Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Tar River Poetry. He is an assistant professor of English at Kutztown University. Other work can be found at www.robertfillman.com.
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Author’s Note:
For years, I’ve been fascinated by the artworks stolen—and potentially lost forever—from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. So I’ve taken on the project of writing an ekphrastic poem for each of the missing masterpieces. When I learned that Govert Flinck’s Landscape with Obelisk and Vermeer’s The Concert were displayed back-to-back, I began to imagine them as a couple—and that’s when my imagination took over.