Loan Exhibition of Dutch Masters of the Seventeenth Century. M. Knoedler & Co

M. Knoedler and Co. held this loan exhibition of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings in November 1925 at the gallery’s newly opened premises at 14 East 57th Street, to which it had moved that same year from 556 Fifth Avenue. The show ran for less than two weeks, from 16 to 28 November, but it was significant for placing before an American audience a group of Dutch Golden Age paintings that had largely remained in European private hands. Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat appeared as catalogue number 1, listed as a portrait of a young woman and lent by Baroness Laurent-Atthalin of Paris, the last private owner in the French lineage that had held the panel since its purchase at a Parisian auction in 1822.

The painting’s long residence in France traced to Louis Marie, Baron Atthalin of Colmar, who acquired the small panel at the Hotel de Bouillon sale in December 1822 for 200 francs. It descended through his nephew and then to Baron Gaston Laurent-Atthalin, and by 1925 it was held by the widowed Baroness. Knoedler acted as agent for the sale, and in November 1925 the painting was acquired by Andrew W. Mellon for $290,000. Mellon, then serving as United States Secretary of the Treasury, was one of Knoedler’s most important clients, and the gallery had cultivated a close relationship with him over many years. The exhibition thus served simultaneously as a public display and as the occasion for one of the most consequential private sales in the painting’s history.

At the time of the exhibition the panel’s attribution was not in serious dispute among scholars, though questions would resurface in later decades, partly because of its unusual support on wood rather than canvas. Mellon transferred the painting to the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust in 1932, and it entered the founding collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington upon that institution’s establishment in 1937, where it has remained.