Paintings by Old Masters from the Beit Collection

In 1949 the South African National Gallery in Cape Town hosted an exhibition of Old Master paintings drawn from the Beit Collection, one of the finest private assemblages of Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century paintings in existence. The collection was formed in the late nineteenth century by Alfred Beit (1853–1906), a Hamburg-born financier who became a partner of Cecil Rhodes and a co-founder of De Beers, accumulating extraordinary wealth through South African diamond mining. With the advice of the German art historian Wilhelm von Bode, Beit built a collection centred on Dutch and Flemish masters, Spanish masters, and British portraitists, including works by Vermeer, Rubens, Gainsborough, Goya, Velázquez, and Frans Hals. On Alfred Beit’s death in 1906 the collection passed first to his brother Sir Otto Beit and then, on Sir Otto’s death in 1930, to his son Sir Alfred Beit, 2nd Baronet (1903–1994). The 1949 Cape Town showing brought this celebrated inheritance before South African audiences, published under a bilingual catalogue title in Afrikaans and English, with the National Gallery of South Africa also issuing a supplement to the main catalogue.

Vermeer’s “Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid” (c. 1670–71) was among the works exhibited. The painting had been part of the Beit family’s holdings since the elder Alfred acquired it around 1895, and it remained in Sir Alfred Beit’s possession throughout the mid-twentieth century. In 1952 Sir Alfred purchased Russborough House in County Wicklow, Ireland, and installed the collection there. The Vermeer became one of the principal treasures of Russborough, and its later history brought it unwanted notoriety: it was stolen in April 1974 by an IRA-linked gang and recovered in County Cork eight days later, then stolen again in May 1986 by a criminal gang led by Martin Cahill, and not recovered until 1993 during a sting operation at Antwerp airport. In 1987 Sir Alfred donated seventeen masterpieces, including the Vermeer, to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, where the painting has remained ever since.

The 1949 Cape Town exhibition stands as one of the earliest major presentations of the Beit Collection to a public audience outside Britain, predating the move to Russborough by three years and offering South African visitors a rare view of the Dutch and Flemish works that Alfred Beit’s South African fortune had made possible.