Gerard de Vries trained and has been employed as an economist; he wrote his dissertation (1975) about European monetary unification. He published many articles on art and literature in Dutch periodicals, but his real “violin d'Ingres” is studying Nabokov’s referential art. With D. Barton Johnson, he wrote Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting (2006) and published in 2016, Silent Love: The Annotation and Interpretation of Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.