Masterpieces from the Royal Picture Gallery

When the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague closed in April 2012 for an extensive two-year renovation and expansion, the museum organised an international tour of its greatest holdings. Nearly fifty works travelled first to Japan in the second half of 2012, appearing at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and the Kobe City Museum. In 2013 a selection of thirty-five paintings continued to the United States, opening at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and then the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, before fifteen highlight works came to the Frick Collection in New York as the tour’s final American venue.

Presented under the title “Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis,“ the Frick showing ran from 22 October 2013 to 19 January 2014. The selection was curated to complement the Frick’s own Dutch and Flemish holdings, foregrounding artists that founder Henry Clay Frick had himself collected. Alongside Girl with a Pearl Earring the exhibition included Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch (1654), Rembrandt’s Simeon’s Song of Praise (1631), paired portraits of Jacob Olycan and Aletta Hanemans (1625) by Frans Hals, Jan Steen’s Girl Eating Oysters (c. 1658–60), Jacob van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds (c. 1670–75), Pieter Claesz’s Vanitas Still Life, and Nicolaes Maes’s The Old Lacemaker, among others.

Girl with a Pearl Earring was installed alone in the Frick’s Oval Room, a curatorial choice that gave the painting the concentrated attention it commands. Queues of visitors stretched nearly a block along Fifth Avenue before opening each day. The pairing of two institutions celebrated for the exceptional quality of their relatively small, jewel-like collections gave the collaboration a particular coherence: the Mauritshuis and the Frick share a sensibility rooted in Dutch and Flemish cabinet painting, and the intimate galleries of the Frick mansion proved a natural home for The Hague’s finest works.