Art-Historical Exhibition

The Kunsthistorische Ausstellung was the art-historical section of the great Internationale Kunstausstellung und große Gartenbau-Ausstellung held in Düsseldorf from 1 May to 23 October 1904. Conceived as a companion to the acclaimed art-historical exhibition of 1902, which had concentrated on the ecclesiastical sculpture, goldsmithing, and reliquary art of the medieval Rhineland, the 1904 show was given over entirely to painting. It surveyed the whole field of West German painting, above all the Lower- and Middle-Rhenish schools together with the related Netherlandish and Westphalian masters, from the fifteenth-century primitives to the developed sixteenth century, rounded out by a select upper gallery of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish work. Vermeer was represented by a single canvas, the Study of a Young Woman, then in the collection of the Duke of Arenberg in Brussels.

In the catalogue, prepared by Dr Eduard Firmenich-Richartz, the picture appears as no. 398 under the heading “Jan Vermeer (van der Meer) van Delft.” It is described as the bust of a young girl of delicate complexion, turned to the left, her head lit by a pale light and turned full toward the viewer, a white cloth about her shoulders and a yellowish veil falling behind, with pearls at her ears, signed at the upper left “…meer.” Its dimensions are recorded as 0.46 by 0.35 metres on canvas. The work entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1979 as a gift of Mr and Mrs Charles Wrightsman, who had acquired it from the Arenberg collection.

The exhibition drew on the cathedral treasuries at Aachen, Cologne, and Trier, on churches and libraries across the Rhineland and Westphalia, and on the great West German private collections. Among its patrons were the King of Württemberg, the Grand Duke of Hesse, and the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, while the Duke of Arenberg lent the most precious paintings and tapestries from his houses in Brussels and Nordkirchen. The catalogue was issued in a second, revised edition in August 1904 by the Verlag der Ausstellungsleitung in Düsseldorf.