The Rescue Artist

Royal Navy recruiter. Cahill and the other applicants were asked to scan a brochure that listed various posts they might train for. Cahill’s eyes lit on “bugler,” an unfamiliar word. He hadn’t known the Navy needed burglars, Cahill told his interviewer, but he had plenty of experience.

In years to come, the stories that swirled around Cahill’s name would be decidedly darker. Cahill was hugely feared, a Dublin legend discussed mostly in nervous whispers. “People remember pain,” he once said. “A bullet through the head is too easy. You think of the pain before you do wrong again.”

Cahill delighted in handing out punishments that fed the rumors. He once crucified a member of his own gang he suspected of treachery: while henchmen held his victim down, Cahill nailed the man’s hands to the floor. When he was not terrorizing friends and rivals, Cahill lived a life of twisted domesticity, in a happy menage a trois with his wife and her sister. The household spilled over with nine young children, all fathered by Cahill, five with his wife and four with his sister-in-law.

In Cahill’s professional life, contempt for authority played as large a role as lust for money. His aim was never merely to outdo his enemies but to humiliate them, to proclaim his “fuck you” disdain to the world. In 1987, for example, thieves broke into the public prosecutor’s office in Dublin and stole hundreds of the state’s files on pending criminal cases. No one doubted whose handiwork it was.

Cahill savored even the pettiest triumphs over the powers that be. Through his years atop the criminal underworld, he took time each week to queue up for his weekly unemployment check, so he could thumb his nose at the state that denounced him as a public enemy but had no choice but to keep him on its payroll. The ?92 checks were beside the point—Cahill owned two homes, five cars, and six motorcycles—but he thrived on the game- playing.

All the gangster’s pranks proclaimed the same message: “I’m smarter than you are, and you can’t touch me.” He formed a group called Concerned Criminals, which advocated the right to “earn a dishonest living.” A favorite Cahill ploy, on nights when his gang was engaged in a theft or a kidnapping, was to barge into a busy police station and make a scene, so that the police themselves would become his alibi.

On one occasion, when tax authorities sent an inspector to go over Cahill’s accounts, the gangster played the genial host. At one point he excused himself to make a phone call, then returned to his guest and made a few remarks about vandalism and other dispiriting aspects of the modern world. Cahill gestured out the window to the street. “Now, d’ya see what I mean, just look out that window and look what those bloody vandals have done now.” The tax inspector’s car was in flames, burning like a bonfire.

Cahill’s assault on Russborough House, a palatial mansion outside Dublin that housed one of the world’s greatest private art collections, was his first venture into art crime. The robbery was doubly tempting, for it allowed Cahill to indulge both his greed and his hatred of the upper crust. The house, with a facade stretching 700 feet, was, by some accounts, the handsomest in Ireland. Built in the eighteenth century for a prosperous Dublin brewer (later the first Earl of Milltown), Russborough House had since 1952 belonged to an English couple, Sir Alfred and Lady Beit.

Sir Alfred had inherited a fortune—and a dazzling art collection—from an uncle who was one of the founders of the De Beers diamond company in South Africa. Lady Beit—Clementine Freeman-Mitford—occupied a high rank in the English pecking order and was a first cousin of the Mitford sisters, glamorous, aristocratic siblings (six altogether) notorious for their personal and political misadventures. The Beits had lived in South Africa for several years but had decided, in the early 1950s, to return to Britain. While flipping through the pages of Country Life magazine, Sir Alfred saw a photograph of Russborough House. He purchased the 100-room house without ever having seen it in person.

In 1986 Sir Alfred announced a plan to donate 17 of the masterpieces of his collection to the National Gallery of Ireland. Cahill pricked up his ears. The opportunity to make a fortune for himself and to deprive the state of a gift it coveted set him to planning in earnest. Sir Alfred’s gift included Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, a stunning painting that was by far the best, and the best-known, in the Beit collection. “Everything of Vermeer is in the Beit Letter,” one enraptured scholar had written.

Lady Writing a Letter was one of only two Vermeers in private hands; the other belonged to Queen Elizabeth. The painting was valued at ?20 million. (After Vermeer’s death, his widow had given it and a second of her husband’s works, Lady Playing a Guitar, to a baker in Delft to settle a debt. The Vermeers owed the baker 617 florins, just under $80 in today’s currency.)

Vermeer, like Shakespeare, is a genius whose biography is almost completely unknown to us. (Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl with a Pearl Earring is a triumph of imagination that succeeds because of Chevalier’s artistry in building up a plausible world from a handful of scattered facts.) The little information we do have only deepens the mystery. The artist who created paintings that embody quiet and calm lived and worked in a house with 11 children (four others died in infancy). The house belonged to his mother-in-law, who lived there, too, and at first had opposed her daughter’s marriage. Amid the noise and bustle, Vermeer devised masterpieces that the historian E. H. Gombrich aptly described as “still lifes with human beings.”

Vermeer’s professional life seemed no more likely than his domestic arrangements to promote serenity. At his peak Vermeer was one of Delft’s more successful artists, but painting never provided nearly enough to live on. Though many of his peers painted perhaps fifty works in the course of a year, Vermeer turned out only two or three. His work brought in about 200 guilders a year, about as much as a sailor’s pay. Throughout his life, he worked a second job, as an art dealer, and selling other people’s work proved far more profitable than selling his own.

Late in life, Vermeer sank into debt. For the last three years of his life, he sold no paintings at all. He fell into “decay and decadence,” his wife later recalled, in a statement that was a mandatory part of the process of declaring bankruptcy, and then “in a day and a half he had gone from being healthy to being dead.” He was forty- three.

The rest of the story is scraps and gaps. Vermeer’s grandfather, one scholar has learned, was a watchmaker who strayed into coin-forging. He managed to leave town a step ahead of the police, but two of his accomplices were convicted and beheaded. Of Vermeer’s career, almost nothing is known beyond what the paintings themselves reveal. He seems to have painted mainly for individual patrons rather than for the market at large: a printer named Jacob Dissius owned nineteen Vermeers. (They were auctioned off, for an average price of about $500 in today’s money, after the printer’s death.)

Vermeer left no diaries or letters. His personality, his motivation, his judgment of his own achievement— mysteries all. Perhaps we know what he looked like as a young man: some scholars believe that a figure in an early work called The Procuress is a self-portrait. Vermeer served a six-year apprenticeship to an older artist—this was a requirement for membership in Delft’s art guild, which he joined in 1653, at age twenty- one—so we know that someone taught him. No one knows who. Vermeer himself took no pupils. No one knows who posed for him, though some historians speculate that his wife may have modeled for Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window or several other works, or that one or another of his grown daughters may have modeled for Girl with a Pearl Earring or Girl with a Red Hat, among others.

“The greatest mystery of all,” in the words of the historian Paul Johnson, “is how his works fell into a black hole of taste for nearly two hundred years. He is now more generally, and unreservedly, admired than any other painter.”

Vermeer’s obscurity lasted from his death, in 1675, until 1866, when a French critic named Theophile Thore wrote three articles hailing the work of the painter he dubbed “the Sphinx of Delft.” (Thore went on to purchase, for prices in the range of a few thousand dollars in today’s terms, Woman with a Pearl Necklace, now in the Staatliche Museum in Berlin; The Concert, stolen from the Gardner in 1990; and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal and Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, today both at the National Gallery in London.) Fascinated by Vermeer’s use of light, the impressionists took up the cause, celebrating Vermeer as an ally two centuries ahead of his time. But not even the most fervent of those early admirers could have imagined that Vermeer would someday draw crowds who would wait in line for hours to see blockbuster shows devoted to his work.

By 1813 Vermeer had fallen so far out of favor that the exquisite Lace-maker, now in the Louvre, sold for ?7, roughly $400 in today’s terms. In 1816 his Head of a Girl, which