Loan Exhibition of Masterpieces of Painting (Exposition de chefs-d'oeuvre de la peinture)

In February and March 1942, the Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) presented a loan exhibition of European painting masterpieces at a moment when the war in Europe had made the normal movement of such works across the Atlantic impossible. The occasion that brought these pictures to Montreal was the prolonged wartime sojourn of Dutch and other Old Master paintings in North America. Among the centrepieces was Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, one of the most celebrated works in the Rijksmuseum’s collection, which had traveled to the United States for the 1939 New York World’s Fair as part of the ‘Masterpieces of Art’ exhibition. When Germany occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, the painting could not be returned, and it remained on the continent for the duration of the war.

During its wartime exile in North America, The Milkmaid circulated through a series of institutional exhibitions that gave Canadian and American audiences a rare chance to see it in person. It was shown at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1939, immediately after the World’s Fair, and again in Detroit in 1941. The Montreal showing in early 1942 followed in that sequence, bringing the painting to Canada for the first time. Later that same year it appeared at the Duveen Galleries in New York in a benefit exhibition for the Queen Wilhelmina Fund, which supported Dutch war relief, and it continued to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as late as 1944. The Milkmaid did not return to Amsterdam until after the liberation of the Netherlands.

The Montreal exhibition offered visitors an extraordinary encounter with a painting that, under ordinary peacetime conditions, was firmly ensconced in Amsterdam. Vermeer’s depiction of a kitchen maid pouring milk, painted around 1657 to 1658, was already regarded as one of the supreme achievements of Dutch Golden Age painting, prized for its monumental stillness, its mastery of light falling across rough plaster and humble earthenware, and its concentrated attention to an everyday subject. That it could be seen in Montreal at all was a consequence of the upheaval that had displaced so much of European cultural life westward.