Since I began writing The Chrysalis, the topic of who owns artwork plundered during wartime has become headline news. Some courts and legislatures have made efforts to rectify the inequities in the law, injustices that did not anticipate the horror of the Holocaust. Conferences have been conducted; guiding principles established; commissions on looted assets formed; art-loss registers created; legislation considered and, in some situations, adopted. Plaintiffs have filed more and more cases, and some courts have begun to shift the case law. Given that private plaintiffs seeking the restitution of art looted by the Nazis must still leap over many of the same hurdles as Hilda Baum, however, I left those developments unmentioned and unexplored. They will make a brief appearance in my next book.
The idea for introducing a fictional seventeenth-century Dutch artist and painting into this realistic legal setting came mainly from my reverence for the artwork of that time period: the quality of the light, the near-photographic attention to detail, and, most of all, the multifaceted symbolism, which acts as a prism that changes the viewer’s initial perception. The full reason is more complicated. Since The Chrysalis’s legal issues focus on who owns artwork throughout time, I thought it might be intriguing to make the custodial fate of the painting dictated by its iconography. I became captivated by the idea that the painting’s religious symbolism would determine its ultimate destiny—namely, to be acquired by Erich Baum for his personal worship, to be discarded by the Nazis due to its Catholic message, to be welcomed by the Jesuits as a returned treasure, and, lastly, to be sought after by Hilda Baum as a remembrance of her late father. The seventeenth-century Dutch paintings—with the hidden stories that lay beneath their deceptively simple scenes—seemed perfect. But no one existing painting told each of the stories I hoped to share. So, I created Johannes Miereveld. And The Chrysalis.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HEATHER TERRELL is a lawyer with more than ten years’ experience as a litigator at two of the country’s premier law firms and for Fortune 500 companies. She is a graduate of Boston College and of the Boston University School of Law. She lives in Pittsburgh. The Chrysalis is her first novel.
The Chrysalis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Heather Benedict Terrell
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Terrell, Heather.
The chrysalis: a novel / Heather Terrell.
p. cm.
1. Art treasures in war—Fiction. 2. Cultural property—Repatriation—Fiction. 3. Art thefts—Fiction. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Destruction and pillage—Europe—Fiction. 5. Europe—Fiction. 6. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3620.E75C47 2007
813'.6—dc22
2006034422
www.ballantinebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-50029-8
v3.0
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