By Theresa Rézeau

In 1881, a neglected painting appeared at an auction in The Hague.

Its condition was poor. According to accounts of the sale, it was dirty enough that its authorship could not immediately be established with certainty. The collector Arnoldus Andries des Tombe acquired it for two guilders, plus thirty cents commission.

The painting was Girl with a Pearl Earring, created around 1665 by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), one of the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age.

Today, it is one of the most recognisable images in Western art. The Mauritshuis in The Hague, where it entered the collection through Des Tombe’s bequest, regards the painting as priceless. The journey from two guilders to priceless seems, at first, to be a story about money. It is really a story about value.

That distinction occupied Warren Buffett for much of his extraordinary career. Buffett built his reputation by refusing to assume that price and value were the same thing.

The full essay continues in the Membership Archive, where Vermeer, Buffett and the language of value become a reflection on why price can change dramatically while worth remains much harder to measure.