Temporary Exhibition

In April 1906, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a short Temporary Exhibition lasting four weeks, in which Young Woman with a Water Pitcher appeared under the title “Young Woman at a Window” as catalogue number 40. The work had been part of the permanent collection for seventeen years by that point, donated along with thirty-six other Old Master paintings by Henry G. Marquand on 10 January 1889 — the largest single gift the museum had received to that date and a defining moment in American institutional collecting.

Marquand had acquired the Vermeer between 1887 and 1889, and it is regarded as probably the first painting by Vermeer to enter an American collection of any kind. The 1906 showing gave New York audiences a further occasion to encounter the picture in a focused gallery context, even as it remained on regular view in the museum’s Dutch and Flemish galleries. The exhibition’s brief April run coincided with the early tenure of Roger Fry, who joined the museum as Curator of Paintings that same year.