A Loan Exhibition of Dutch Paintings

In January 1925 the Detroit Institute of Arts opened a loan exhibition of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings that ran for just sixteen days, from 9 to 25 January. The show was organised by Wilhelm R. Valentiner, who had been appointed the museum's director that same year after five years as its chief adviser, and who used the occasion to signal Detroit's ambitions as a centre for Dutch Old Master scholarship in America. Valentiner, a Rembrandt specialist trained at the Mauritshuis in The Hague and at Berlin's Kaiser Friedrich Museum, contributed a closely argued essay on the works to The American Magazine of Art in the March 1925 issue, giving the brief showing an intellectual reach beyond its short run.

Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance(catalogue no. 33) was lent by Joseph E. Widener of Lynnewood Hall, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. Widener had inherited the painting from his father, Peter A. B. Widener, who purchased it from the dealers Knoedler in January 1911 after it passed through P. and D. Colnaghi in London. The Widener family kept the canvas at Lynnewood Hall, opening the estate's gallery to visitors by appointment in summer months, but also lending selectively to loan shows such as this one. David Lloyd's survey “The Vermeers in America,” published in International Studio in November 1925, reproduced the painting and cited its appearance at Detroit as evidence of the remarkable concentration of Vermeer canvases then in American private hands.

Joseph Widener eventually gave the painting to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1942, where it remains part of the Widener Collection. The 1925 Detroit exhibition is thus an early record of the picture's public showing during its decades at Lynnewood Hall, and one of the few occasions on which it traveled before entering its permanent institutional home.