Loan Exhibition of Twelve Masterpieces of Painting, M. Knoedler & Co

In April 1928 M. Knoedler and Co. presented a tightly focused loan exhibition of just twelve paintings at its 57th Street gallery in New York. The show ran from 16 to 28 April and gathered a small group of high-quality Dutch and Flemish works drawn from leading private collections. Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat appeared as catalogue number 12, the last entry in the checklist, and was shown as a work in the collection of Andrew W. Mellon, who had acquired it through the same gallery in November 1925.

The exhibition gave American visitors a rare opportunity to see the small panel alongside comparable Dutch masterpieces. By 1928 Mellon had assembled one of the foremost private collections of old master paintings in the country, shaped in large part through his long relationship with Knoedler, which over the preceding decades had placed several Dutch and Flemish works with him. The gallery’s practice of gathering choice loans for brief, concentrated shows was well established by this period and helped build the market for northern European painting among American collectors and institutions.

Mellon transferred Girl with a Red Hat to the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust in 1932, and it became part of the founding bequest to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1937. The 1928 Knoedler exhibition was one of only two occasions the painting appeared in a public loan show during Mellon’s ownership, both times at the gallery through which he had bought it.