Dutch Pictures from the Royal Collection

“Dutch Pictures from the Royal Collection” brought together a selection of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings from across the Royal Collection for an extended exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, running from July through December 1971. The Queen’s Gallery had opened in 1962 on the site of the palace chapel destroyed during the Second World War, and it operated from the outset on a rotating-exhibition model, displaying works from the vast holdings of the Royal Collection that were not otherwise on public view. The catalogue, written by Oliver Millar and published by Lund Humphries in London, ran to 96 pages with 75 illustrations. Millar was then Deputy Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures (he became Surveyor in 1972), and the exhibition drew on his deep knowledge of the Dutch and Flemish holdings that had accumulated in the collection over centuries of royal patronage and acquisition.

The Music Lesson (RCIN 405346) appeared as catalogue number 10, on pages 19 and 74. The painting had entered the Royal Collection in 1762 when King George III purchased the Venetian dealer Joseph Smith’s collection. At that time it was attributed to Frans van Mieris the Elder, a misreading of the partially legible signature that persisted until 1866, when the French critic Théophile Thoré correctly identified the work as Vermeer’s. By 1971 it was firmly established as one of the finest pictures in the collection, painted around 1662 to 1665, and depicting a woman at a virginal in a sunlit interior while a man stands beside her. The mirror above the instrument reflects the woman’s face toward the viewer, a compositional device that gives the scene its characteristic depth and quiet tension.

The Royal Collection holds one of the strongest concentrations of Dutch Golden Age paintings outside the Netherlands, assembled largely through the taste of King Charles I and the later purchases of George III and George IV. Millar’s exhibition gave London audiences a rare opportunity to see this material gathered and presented as a coherent body of work, with The Music Lesson as one of its central exhibits.