Brush with Fate

Plot

Richard, a new art teacher at a high school, is invited by history teacher Cornelia Englebrecht (Glenn Close) to see a painting of a young girl at a table, which she believes is a genuine Vermeer. She tells him stories about the painting's past owners, shown as flashbacks, all set in the Netherlands and mostly occurring in reverse chronological order. The first story, from the late 1800s, involves a romance and contains flashbacks within flashbacks. Another story, set in the early 1700s, depicts a baby abandoned during a flood after a dike break; the painting accompanied the baby and was intended to be sold for the child's expenses. In the next story, a man leaves a university to work with dike machinery and becomes interested in a servant girl punished in stocks; this story reveals the baby's origin. A brief story follows, in which a woman who fails to bid successfully for the painting at auction seems to know more about it than the auctioneer. The next story shows how Vermeer came to paint the girl's picture. Finally, Cornelia explains how she herself acquired the painting.