The Baltimore Museum of Art Presents an Exhibition of Paintings by Living Masters of the Past

The Baltimore Museum of Art mounted this survey of great historical painters under the deliberately paradoxical title “Living Masters of the Past,“ presenting Old Master works as living presences rather than museum relics. The phrase captured a postwar-era curatorial argument that the canonical painters of the Dutch, Flemish, and Italian traditions remained vital touchstones for contemporary art and its audiences.

Vermeer was represented by A Lady Writing, which appeared in the catalogue unnumbered but illustrated. The painting had been in American circulation since 1940, when it entered the collection of the gold-mining magnate Sir Harry Oakes. Sir Harry was murdered at his Nassau estate on the night of July 7-8, 1943 -- just three months before the Baltimore opening -- and ownership passed immediately to his widow, Lady Eunice Oakes. It was therefore as a loan from Lady Eunice Oakes that the canvas traveled to Baltimore that autumn.

The Baltimore showing was part of a busy period of American exhibition loans for the picture: it had appeared in New York in 1940, 1941, and 1942, in Chicago in 1942, and at the North Carolina State Art Society Gallery in Raleigh in the same autumn as the Baltimore run. Lady Eunice Oakes retained the painting until 1946, when it re-entered the New York market and eventually made its way to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it has remained.