Loan exhibition for the opening of the new building

On 20 June 1927 the Fogg Art Museum dedicated its new building at 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, the first purpose-built structure in North America for the specialised training of art scholars, conservators, and museum professionals. The ceremony, attended by some three hundred guests, was presided over by Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, who handed keys to the door to Director Edward Forbes and Associate Director Paul Sachs. The building, designed by the Boston firm Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott, brought together galleries, seminar rooms, conservation laboratories, and an X-radiography studio under one roof. Contemporary reviews called it “a veritable laboratory” and “a supreme example of its type.”

To inaugurate the new galleries Forbes and Sachs assembled a loan exhibition drawn from private collections, showcasing the kind of firsthand engagement with original masterworks that lay at the heart of their teaching philosophy. Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat was among the works lent for the opening. The painting had been acquired only two years earlier, in November 1925, by Andrew W. Mellon for $290,000 through the New York and London dealer M. Knoedler and Co. Mellon was at this time building one of the great American private collections, with a long-term vision of founding a national gallery in Washington. No formal catalogue was published for the Fogg opening exhibition, and the precise list of lenders and works is not fully documented in surviving records.

Mellon deeded the painting on 30 March 1932 to the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust in Pittsburgh, the vehicle he used to hold his pictures while plans for the National Gallery of Art took shape, and the trust transferred it to the NGA at its founding in 1937. The painting remains in the National Gallery’s permanent collection today.