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. His investment philosophy emphasised understanding what something was fundamentally worth rather than allowing excitement, fashion or short-term market movement to make the decision for him.

After six decades at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett announced in 2025 that he would step down as chief executive at the end of that year, with Greg Abel succeeding him. The transition marked the end of one of the longest and most influential tenures in modern business, but the principle associated with Buffett’s approach remains relevant far beyond finance.

Art has always had a complicated relationship with value because it asks us to measure things that resist measurement.

A painting has a price when it is sold. It may have an insurance value. An auction house can provide an estimate, and collectors can compare recent transactions for works by the same artist. Markets are exceptionally good at attaching numbers to objects, but none of those numbers can tell us whether people will still want to stand before the object three hundred years later.

Vermeer understood nothing of the market that would eventually form around his name. Born in Delft in 1632, he died there in 1675, leaving behind a relatively small body of work. Girl with a Pearl Earring itself spent much of its early history outside public consciousness. Its whereabouts during its first two centuries remain uncertain, and it only emerged into documented public view when it appeared at auction in 1881.

Nothing about the modest price paid that day announced its future. The two guilders described what someone was willing to pay for the object at a particular moment, but they could not describe everything the object contained.

Look at the painting itself.

A young woman turns towards us from darkness. Her mouth is slightly open. A blue and yellow head covering frames her face. Light touches her forehead, cheek, lips and eyes before falling towards the object suspended beneath her ear. There is almost nothing else: no elaborate interior establishes her status, no landscape tells us where she stands and no possessions surround her. There is no narrative action from which we can construct a complete story.

Even calling her a particular woman is uncertain. Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a conventional commissioned portrait but a tronie, a type of seventeenth-century study concerned with a character, expression or striking appearance rather than the likeness of an identifiable sitter. We do not know who she was, yet her face has become familiar across the world.

That should make us cautious about assuming that value always announces itself loudly.

Financial markets have their own ways of producing noise. Prices move, predictions multiply, new industries attract capital, and fear and enthusiasm can travel faster than careful analysis. Buffett’s great discipline was not an ability to predict every movement. It was his willingness to think over longer periods than much of the surrounding culture.

The approach has an obvious attraction for collectors, but the comparison between investing and collecting needs care. A painting is not a share certificate, and cultural importance cannot be reduced to financial return. A work may become historically significant without becoming enormously expensive. Another may rise dramatically in price and later fall. An artist’s market can change because of fashion, scholarship, scarcity, museum exhibitions, provenance, speculation or the behaviour of a relatively small number of collectors.

Nor does an increase in price make a painting better. Vermeer’s girl did not become more beautifully painted when scholars recognised her importance. She did not acquire greater subtlety when she entered the Mauritshuis, and her expression did not become more enigmatic when reproductions carried her around the world. What changed was our ability to recognise what had been there.

This is where collecting becomes more interesting than investment. The serious collector is not merely asking, What will this be worth? A deeper question precedes it: What am I looking at?

That question requires patience because quality does not always arrive accompanied by consensus. Art history is filled with reputations that have risen, declined and been reconstructed. Scholarship changes attributions. Social values affect which artists receive attention. Museums revisit collections. Works overlooked by one generation can become essential to another.

Time is not automatically wise, but it is a formidable test. It strips away some fashions while revealing the endurance of other things. It allows generations with different politics, technologies and assumptions to encounter the same object and decide whether it still has something to say. Girl with a Pearl Earring has survived that encounter repeatedly.

Then our attention falls on the pearl.

It appears to be the painting’s jewel, important enough to give the work the title by which the world knows it. Yet Vermeer created its extraordinary luminosity with remarkably little paint. Research by the Mauritshuis has shown how sparingly the illusion is constructed, while the object’s unusually large size has also raised doubts that Vermeer intended us to see an actual pearl. It may instead represent glass or another reflective material.

The most apparently precious object in the painting may therefore derive its power not from the preciousness of the material it represents, but from the intelligence of the illusion.

That is a wonderful complication in a discussion about value.

We are accustomed to believing that precious things should reveal themselves through material or measurement. Gold can be weighed. Diamonds can be graded. Property can be valued. Companies can be analysed. Auction results arrive with numbers attached.

Vermeer offers something much less measurable. A few controlled touches of light persuade the eye that something luminous hangs beneath the girl’s ear. Its power comes not primarily from the substance represented but from the skill with which paint has been transformed into light. The value lies somewhere other than where we first expected to find it.

Buffett’s world and Vermeer’s should not be forced into perfect equivalence. Buffett dealt in businesses capable of producing earnings and compounding capital. Vermeer made paintings whose significance cannot be calculated through cash flow. But both allow us to consider the same human weakness: our tendency to confuse what can be immediately measured with what actually matters.

Price is seductive because it offers the certainty of a number, while value asks for something more difficult: judgement.

Collectors encounter that difficulty whenever they stand before a work that has not yet been validated by consensus. There may be no museum retrospective to reassure them, no auction record to point towards and no fashionable name circulating through every fair. They have to look.

That does not mean abandoning scholarship or market knowledge. Quite the opposite. Serious collecting requires attention to provenance, condition, attribution, historical context and an understanding of an artist’s practice. Instinct without knowledge can become expensive sentimentality, but knowledge ultimately has to serve looking.

The strongest collections are rarely built by purchasing whatever happens to be most visible at a particular moment. They acquire coherence because someone has learned to distinguish attention from significance. The collector begins to understand what belongs in the collection and, equally importantly, what does not. In serious collecting, patience becomes more than waiting; it becomes discernment.

Buffett’s career offers a useful reminder that refusing immediacy can itself be a form of intelligence. In a culture increasingly organised around speed, there is something almost radical about allowing value enough time to reveal its character.

Art asks for the same patience from us.

Return to Vermeer’s girl. In 1881, Des Tombe paid two guilders and thirty cents for the painting. After his death in 1902, he bequeathed it, together with other works, to the Mauritshuis, where it entered a public collection.

Today, asking what someone might pay for it has become almost beside the point. The Mauritshuis regards the painting as priceless, although that does not mean it has escaped economics. Museums require money. Conservation, scholarship, security, insurance and exhibitions all belong to material systems.

What has changed is the meaning of possession. Des Tombe once owned the painting. Generations now inherit the opportunity to encounter it.

The transition from two guilders to priceless is therefore not an extraordinary investment return. To describe it that way would diminish what happened. Over time, the painting accumulated scholarship, recognition, cultural memory and the attention of people who continued to find something in it worth preserving. Its greatest return has been its endurance.

The girl still turns from the darkness. Her lips remain parted. Light catches her eyes and touches the mysterious object beneath her ear.

In 1881, the price was two guilders.
More than a century later, we are still discovering the value.