The Masters of the Dutch Interior

“Die Meister des holländischen Interieurs” was held at Galerie Dr. Schäffer, Behrenstrasse 28, Berlin, in April and May 1929. The gallery had been founded around 1924 by Dr. Hans (Hanns) Schäffer (1892-1967) and quickly established itself as one of the leading commercial venues in Weimar-era Berlin for old master paintings, with a particular emphasis on Flemish and Dutch works of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The 1929 exhibition gathered a broad survey of Dutch interior genre painting, presenting artists such as Berckheyde, Boursse, Leyster, Molenaer, and others alongside the handful of Vermeer works available on the market or on loan.

The Girl with a Wine Glass was lent by the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig, where it had resided since the eighteenth century and where it remains today. It entered the exhibition catalogue not in the main sequence but in a supplementary section: Essential Vermeer records it as “Nachtrag” no. 103a, with an illustration, indicating a late addition to the checklist after the main catalogue had gone to press. The appearance of a supplementary entry with a reproduction suggests the work was considered a highlight worth inserting even at that late stage.

Little documentary record of Galerie Dr. Schäffer’s Berlin years survives in easily accessible form, though exhibition albums and gallery stock photographs from 1927 to 1930 are held by the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Schäffer emigrated in the mid-1930s and reopened as Schaeffer Galleries in New York in 1936, where the business continued specialising in Dutch and Flemish old masters until around 2000.