Exhibition of Works by Old Masters and by Deceased Masters of British School

The Royal Academy of Arts had held an annual loan exhibition of Old Masters at Burlington House since 1870, and the 1894 edition followed the established formula: privately owned works lent for the winter season alongside paintings by deceased British masters. Vermeer was still a relatively unfamiliar name to most English visitors, his rehabilitation having been largely the work of the French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger in the 1860s.

A Lady Seated at a Virginal appeared in the catalogue as no. 93 under the title “A Lady at a Spinet,” lent by T. Humphry Ward. Ward, an art critic and journalist who also acted as an agent for the dealer Thomas Agnew and Sons, had acquired the painting from the London firm Lawrie and Co., who had purchased it from the Paris dealer Sedelmeyer in early 1893. Sedelmeyer had bought it at the Thoré-Bürger estate sale in December 1892, the first time the picture appeared at public auction since it left Delft in the seventeenth century. The painting would pass from Ward to George Salting before 1898, and entered the National Gallery in London as part of the Salting Bequest in 1910.