The Michael Friedsam Collection

Michael Friedsam (1860–1931) was a New York businessman who succeeded Benjamin Altman as president of the department store B. Altman and Company and, like his predecessor, devoted a large part of his fortune to collecting European art. His holdings ranged across medieval objects, Renaissance paintings, decorative arts, and Old Masters, with particular strength in Dutch and Flemish pictures. When Friedsam died in 1931, he bequeathed the bulk of his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a gift then valued at roughly $2.5 million. The Metropolitan placed the collection on public exhibition from 15 November 1932 to 9 April 1933, giving New York audiences their first sustained view of the assembled bequest.

Vermeer’s Allegory of Faith (c. 1670–74) was the most significant Dutch painting in the bequest. The work had a long and winding prior history: the Dutch art historian Abraham Bredius had purchased it at auction in Berlin in 1899 for a modest sum, though he later expressed ambivalence about the canvas, finding it heavy-handed compared with Vermeer’s intimate domestic interiors. Bredius loaned it first to the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where it hung for roughly twenty-four years, and later to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. In 1928, Bredius sold the painting through the Parisian dealer Kleinberger to Friedsam, who brought it to New York and kept it until his death three years later.

The 1932 exhibition allowed the Metropolitan’s curators and the public to see the Allegory of Faith in the context of Friedsam’s broader collection for the first time. The painting depicts a female personification of the Catholic Faith seated beside a globe, with a suspended crystal sphere overhead reflecting a crucifix: an elaborate programmatic work quite unlike Vermeer’s quieter pictures of women in daylit rooms. With the painting now permanently in the collection as the Friedsam Bequest, the Metropolitan became the home of four Vermeers, a depth of representation matched by no other American museum at the time.