It was a still life that fired the imagination of art collector Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, a modest painting that she lit upon during a visit to a European art museum in the 1970s. The work depicted two ornate goblets, a vase of flowers and a stack of gold coins. It was no Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo, not the kind of artwork that draws throngs of viewers nor one of those canonized in the pages of art books. But still something about it beguiled her — its mood, perhaps, or its mysterious light.