The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt

The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt

Author:Susan Runholt [Runholt, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: C429, Extratorrents, Kat
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-03-28T13:00:00+00:00


24

What the Story Said, and Manipulating Mother

The story and picture took up most of the page. Here was the deal.

There was this guy named Willem Mannefeldt who’d died six months before, when he was sixty-seven years old. The Mannefeldt family had made a lot of money back in the seventeenth century selling tulips, and the Mannefeldt company was still selling tulips all over the world. Willem was the head of the company, so he was very rich. He had two children by a previous marriage who inherited his part of the business and most of his money. His third wife, Marianne, who was thirty-two, inherited his house and everything in it.

The paper called the house “one of Amsterdam’s finest residences.” It was on the “exclusive” Herengracht, which is Dutch for Gentlemen’s Canal. (By the way, you already know that Amsterdam is in the country called the Netherlands. Well, the Netherlands is also called Holland, and their language is Dutch. Confusing, I know, but that’s the way it is.)

Earlier in the summer, Marianne had decided to sell the house and move to the south of France, so she started having people come in and look over everything in the house to tell her how much it was worth.

They found a bunch of old paintings, which they sent out to an art expert. He took them all out of their frames to look at them, and on the back of this one big, ugly painting that had been in the attic, he found something he thought was a painting by Rembrandt.

When this guy told Marianne what he’d discovered, she took it to the Rijksmuseum to have them examine it. (I found out later that Rijksmuseum means “National Museum” in Dutch, and that Rijks rhymes with yikes.) A guy there, whose name was Jacob Hannekroot, was a world-famous expert on paintings by Rembrandt. He examined it with all sorts of tests of how old the paint and the canvas were and other things, and finally he said it was the real thing.

Marianne said the painting should stay in the Netherlands, so she sold it to the Rijksmuseum for what they called an “undisclosed sum.” Experts thought the museum probably paid more than twenty million dollars for it.

According to the paper, the newly discovered painting finished off the story of Lucretia. The article told about the Lucretia legend, and about the other two paintings of her. They even mentioned the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The Third Lucretia showed her husband, her father, a female servant, and an unidentified man standing around Lucretia after she died and her body was put on her bed.

The article said that this painting was quite different from the first two, because instead of being “portrait” shaped, which means longer up and down than wide, this one was “landscape” shaped, or horizontal. It also said that this one had what they called “conventional symbolic elements,” including the little dog, a mirror, and a candle in the background. Mostly Rembrandt didn’t include a lot of symbols in his paintings, so this was unusual for him.



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