A mere $62,500 an inch?

If an early painting by Pablo Picasso, who churned out thousands of works during his long life, is worth more than $100 million, how can one of the mere 36 paintings known to have been made by Johannes Vermeer be valued at only $5 million? That’s the question for auction watchers as they ponder Sotheby’s May 5 sale of Picasso’s “Boy With a Pipe” and look forward to the firm’s July 7 auction in London of Vermeer’s “Young Woman Seated at the Virginals.”

But New York dealer Richard Feigen, who examined the Vermeer in his office about 25 years ago, when its authenticity was in question, says Sotheby’s $5-million estimate is not out of line. Long thought to have been a fake, the tiny painting of a Dutch woman at a keyboard, which measures a mere 10 inches by 8 inches, is now accepted as authentic by specialists who spent about 10 years studying the painting.

But that doesn’t make it as valuable as might be assumed, Feigen says.

“It’s hard to speculate about the price because there hasn’t been a Vermeer on the market for a long time,” he says, “but the estimate on this one is based on its quality, importance, size and probably the fact that it has been, although not recently, hawked around the market. It’s a nice, small, 17th century Dutch painting. But it’s the least significant of all the works of Vermeer.”

The painting was consigned to auction by the estate of Belgian collector and dealer Baron Frederic Rolin, who bought the Vermeer in 1960 and died in 2002.