From El Greco to Cézanne: Masterpieces of European Painting from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This landmark joint loan brought 72 masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to the National Gallery of Greece (Ethnike Pinakotheke) in Athens, running from December 1992 to April 1993. The exhibition was organized as the American contribution to a bilateral cultural exchange commemorating the 2,500th anniversary of the birth of Greek democracy, a partnership whose Greek counterpart, “The Greek Miracle,” simultaneously displayed fifth-century BC antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Spanning three centuries of European painting from the Mannerist to the Impressionist period, the Athens show drew over 600,000 visitors, an unprecedented attendance for the National Gallery of Greece.

Woman with a Lute appeared as catalogue number 14, lent by the Metropolitan Museum (acc. no. 25.110.24), where it had resided since 1925 through the bequest of Collis P. Huntington. At the time of the exhibition the painting’s attribution to Vermeer was not universally settled among scholars: Albert Blankert had excluded it from his 1976 catalogue raisonné, citing the picture’s damaged and abraded condition as making firm attribution difficult, though the Metropolitan and most other authorities continued to accept it as autograph. It has since been generally reinstated in the Vermeer canon and is now catalogued by the Met under the title “Young Woman with a Lute.”