Chasing Vermeer

Chasing Vermeer is a children's art mystery novel by the American writer Blue Balliett, illustrated by Brett Helquist. It is set in Hyde Park, Chicago, near the University of Chicago, and it follows two children, Calder Pillay and Petra Andalee.

The two of them are brought together by a series of apparently unrelated events and by the theft of a Vermeer, A Lady Writing, which disappears while it is being taken to the Art Institute of Chicago. The thief publishes a series of advertisements in the newspaper, setting out the terms on which the painting will be given back: the community has to establish which of the works attributed to Vermeer were actually painted by him. That demand turns a single theft into a puzzle about art and attribution, and it sends Calder, Petra and the people around them to look at paintings, and at the assumptions they have been making about them, in a different way.

Balliett wrote the book for a classroom and built it around real questions about art and evidence, and she wrote it specifically to give weight to the ideas of children. Themes of art, chance, coincidence and deception run through the plot, and two further novels followed, The Wright 3 and The Calder Game.