Loan Exhibition of Allied Art for Allied Aid for the Benefit of the Red Cross War Relief Fund

In the spring of 1940, as German forces swept through Western Europe, M. Knoedler and Co. organised this benefit exhibition at its Fifth Avenue galleries to raise funds for the Red Cross War Relief Fund. The title played on a double meaning: the works on display were art from the Allied nations (France, Britain, and the Low Countries), and the proceeds would provide aid to those same countries in their hour of need. Alfred M. Frankfurter, writing in Art News in June 1940, described the show as presenting important French, British, Dutch, and Flemish works and noted the quality of the assembled loans.

Vermeer’s A Lady Writing appeared in the exhibition as catalogue number 6. At that moment the painting was passing through a transition in ownership: J. P. Morgan, Jr. had consigned it to Knoedler in 1935 and the gallery acquired it outright in 1940. The benefit exhibition provided a public showing for the canvas before it was sold later that year to Sir Harry Oakes, the Canadian gold-mining magnate and baronet, who kept it at his Nassau estate.

The exhibition was one of several benefit shows organised by New York dealers and museums in 1940 as American public sympathy turned toward the embattled Allied nations, even while the United States remained officially neutral. Using Old Master loans from major private collections to draw audiences and generate charitable income became a characteristic strategy of the New York gallery world in these years, and Knoedler, with its access to the finest private holdings in the country, was well placed to mount shows of this calibre.