Good morning.

Today, an auction in The Hague in 1881… and a masterpiece that sold for the price of a dinner.

Let’s begin.

◆

The Girl Who Sold for Two Guilders

Johannes Vermeer—Girl with a Pearl Earring

T	he Hague. 1881. A small painting of a girl in a turban, in poor condition, comes up at auction. Almost nobody in the room is interested. It sells for two guilders, plus thirty cents in fees… roughly the price of a good dinner.

The buyer is a collector named Arnoldus Andries des Tombe. He is acting on the advice of the art official Victor de Stuers, who has spent years trying to stop rare Dutch paintings from leaving the country.

The painting is by Johannes Vermeer of Delft. That name meant very little at the time.

Vermeer had died in 1675, aged 43, deep in debt, leaving his wife with eleven children still at home. He painted slowly, perhaps two or three pictures a year, and only about 35 survive. After his death, he was largely forgotten for two centuries.

Then, in the 1860s, a French critic named Théophile Thoré-Bürger began writing about him with wild enthusiasm. He called Vermeer “the sphinx of Delft.” Slowly, collectors started to look again.

Des Tombe had no children. When he died, he left the painting to the Mauritshuis, the royal picture gallery in The Hague. It arrived there in 1902, and it has been the museum’s star ever since.

This is what two guilders bought.

Trump’s Dollar 2.0 – what you need to know

◆

In December President Trump will take the stage and shock the world.

Standing before the leaders of the most powerful nations on earth, at his own resort in Miami, I believe he’s set to unveil something that will impact every dollar you have saved and invested.

The original agenda for the G20 Summit was development finance and climate change.

That’s been scrapped.

Instead, my research indicates Trump could unveil a radical monetary reset that no one has prepared you for.

I've been tracking this story for months.

And the deeper I investigate, the more convinced I become that what happens in that room could draw a brutal dividing line – between those who understand what's happening to their money, and those who do not.

Which means between now and December, there is a window. A chance to get ahead of what could be the most consequential change to our money in half a century.

It wasn't voted on. It wasn't debated in the Senate. And most Americans have no idea it's even taking place but…

President Trump is replacing the U.S. dollar.

Not with crypto. Not with a digital currency. Something far bigger than that – and it's already been signed and sealed in the back rooms of D.C., ready to be issued by the U.S. Treasury.

Bypassing every legal and political channel under the guise of "national security," Trump has enacted this total money reset using a landmark executive order (14241).

Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, whether you support this new money or not, it doesn't matter.

Soon, every U.S. citizen will be forced to use Trump's New Dollar to fill their gas tank, buy groceries, and pay medical bills.

Which is why I've produced a critical new documentary laying out exactly what Trump's New Dollar means for your savings, your investments, and your family's financial future.

Detailing three important steps you can take today to prepare – including the name of a core band of assets connected to Trump’s initiative that could surge as a result.

As you’ll see in my briefing, the last time America reset its money like this – under Richard Nixon’s presidency in the 1970s – it created one of the greatest wealth divides in the history of our nation.

On one side, it minted an average of 1,300 new millionaires a day for over half a century. And on the other… the folks left behind, drowning in debt, with no idea how to use America’s new money to create wealth.

As Trump rolls out his new dollar, the question is:

Which side will you be on?

PS. If you’re wondering what Trump’s new money will look like, when it will be issued, what it means for your investments – all of those questions are answered in my briefing.

Johannes Vermeer, “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” about 1665. Oil on canvas. Mauritshuis, The Hague. Public domain.

Start with the movement. She has just turned her head over her shoulder, as if someone behind her has said her name. Her lips are parted, about to answer.

Now look at the light. It catches her eyes, the wet corner of her mouth, and the drop hanging from her ear. Then follow it up to the turban, a deep blue against a band of yellow cloth.

That blue is ultramarine, made by grinding up lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone. It was one of the most expensive pigments a Dutch painter could buy. Vermeer used it lavishly, even though he was always short of money.

Here is the surprise. She is not a portrait of anyone. The Dutch called this kind of picture a tronie… a study of a face, a type or an expression, painted for the open market rather than for a sitter who paid. In other words, we do not know who she was, and we were never meant to.

Back in 2018, the Mauritshuis put the painting inside a glass studio in its galleries, and a team led by the conservator Abbie Vandivere examined it with scanners and microscopes while visitors watched. The results came out in 2020.

They found tiny eyelashes, too faint to see with the naked eye. The scanners also showed that the dark background was once a green curtain, which has faded to black over three centuries. And they looked very closely at the pearl.

“It has no contour and also no hook to hang it from the girl’s ear.”

Abbie Vandivere, Mauritshuis, 2020

The famous pearl is a few touches of white paint, some translucent and some opaque. Your eye does the rest.

She lives in a small 17th-century city palace beside a lake in the centre of The Hague.

The Mauritshuis, The Hague. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

She rarely leaves it. This summer was an exception: from 21 August to 27 September 2026, she travelled to the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka, while the Mauritshuis closed for alterations. Now she is home again.

In the same museum hangs Vermeer’s most famous cityscape, his View of Delft, painted around the same years.

Johannes Vermeer, “View of Delft,” about 1660–61. Mauritshuis, The Hague. Public domain.

I had seen her on so many tote bags and fridge magnets that I nearly walked past her. Then I stopped in front of the real thing and noticed the two tiny dots of light at the corner of her mouth. I stayed for twenty minutes. The souvenirs had never shown me that she was about to speak.

You can zoom into the painting yourself, close enough to see the pearl dissolve into brushstrokes: Girl with a Pearl Earring, zoomable image →

In 1881, nobody wanted her. Today she is one of the most recognised faces in art… and she still has not told anyone her name.

◆

Three Things Worth Knowing

I	Literature The Novel

In 1999, the American-British writer Tracy Chevalier published Girl with a Pearl Earring, a novel that imagines the girl as Griet, a young maid in Vermeer’s household. It is pure invention, since nobody knows who sat for the picture. But it became a worldwide bestseller, and for many readers it is the reason they know the painting at all.

II	Film The Film

In 2003, the novel became a film directed by Peter Webber, with Scarlett Johansson as Griet and Colin Firth as Vermeer. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, for its cinematography, art direction and costumes. The camera work deliberately copies Vermeer’s soft daylight from a window on the left.

III	Science The Price of Blue

Ultramarine comes from lapis lazuli, a stone that for centuries was mined mainly in the mountains of Afghanistan. Grinding and purifying it was slow and costly, so the pigment was often worth more than its weight in gold. The 2018 research also studied where Vermeer’s pigments came from. Synthetic ultramarine, invented in France in the 1820s, finally made the colour cheap.

◆

Curious & Controversial

◆	Who was she? Some writers have suggested Vermeer’s eldest daughter, Maria, who was about the right age. There is no evidence for any name, and the museum says her identity is still unknown.

◆	Is it even a pearl? The Dutch astrophysicist Vincent Icke has argued that a real pearl that size would be impossibly large, and that it was more likely polished tin or glass. The debate continues.

◆	Did Vermeer use a camera obscura, an early optical device that projects an image through a lens? Some historians, such as Philip Steadman, believe he did. Others think the evidence is overstated.

◆	The painting is often called “the Mona Lisa of the North.” Some critics find the comparison unhelpful, since one is a commissioned portrait of a real woman and the other is not a portrait at all.

◆

Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Seeing This Week

She is back on her wall in The Hague after her summer in Japan. The Mauritshuis is small enough to see in an afternoon, with Vermeer’s View of Delft, Fabritius’s The Goldfinch and eleven Rembrandts in the same building.

Where: Mauritshuis, Plein 29, 2511 CS The Hague. Open Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; Monday 1–6 p.m. Tickets: €21 for adults; free for under-19s. Payment by card only. Insider tip: The museum itself advises coming after 3 p.m. to avoid the crowds, and photography is allowed, so you can take your own close-up. Plan your visit at mauritshuis.nl →

Worth Reading

Vermeer’s Hat — Timothy Brook (2008). A historian reads the objects in Vermeer’s paintings, a hat, a dish, a map, as clues to how 17th-century trade first connected the world.

Explore Further

Zoom: The pearl, up close →, the zoomable image linked by the Mauritshuis.

Read: Closer to Vermeer and the Girl →, the museum’s own report on the 2018 research.

Tonight’s Quiz

1. How much did the painting sell for at auction in 1881?

A) Two guilders and thirty cents

B) Two hundred guilders

C) Two thousand guilders

D) Twenty thousand guilders

Answer: A. Arnoldus Andries des Tombe bought it for almost nothing and later left it to the Mauritshuis.

2. What is a tronie?

A) A portrait of a paying client

B) A study of a face or type, not a specific person

C) A painting of a city view

D) A small religious painting

Answer: B. Tronies were sold on the open market, which is why we do not know who the girl was.

3. What did the 2018 research find behind the girl?

A) A hidden window

B) A faded green curtain

C) A second figure

D) A painted map

Answer: B. The dark background was once a green curtain that has faded to black over the centuries.

If the links above don’t respond in your email app, just reply with your answers—I’ll write back.

◆

Vermeer died poor and was forgotten for two hundred years. His girl was sold for the price of a dinner. Fame, it seems, is very bad at arriving on time.

Tomorrow, a house built right on top of a waterfall… and the architect who, as the story goes, drew it in a single morning.

In good taste,
Charles T. Mayfair

Editor, Connoisseur Daily

P.S. Say his name the Dutch way, roughly ver-MEER. And if you visit, stand a little to the left of centre. That is where the light in the painting comes from, and her gaze seems to find you there.