The Painter's Light

This small but focused exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art examined light as a formal and expressive subject in Dutch and Flemish painting, opening on 5 October 1971 and running through 10 November. The accompanying essay by John Walsh Jr., then associate curator of European paintings at the Met, appeared as the sole article in the Museum Bulletin for October and November 1971 (vol. 30, no. 2) and served as the primary published statement of the exhibition’s thesis. Walsh argued that the rendering of light was not incidental to seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters but was itself the central achievement of the period, the quality that distinguished their work from contemporaneous Italian and French practice and gave the northern tradition its distinctive character.

Vermeer’s Woman with a Lute (cat. no. 13), then already in the Met’s collection, was a natural choice for this inquiry. The painting shows a young woman at a window, her face turned toward the light falling from the left, with the softened outlines and pearlescent diffusion that Walsh identified as characteristic of Vermeer’s handling of daylight indoors. The exhibition drew on the Museum’s own holdings rather than assembling large loans, making it a focused cabinet display designed to accompany and illustrate the arguments of Walsh’s Bulletin essay. Walsh would go on to become one of the leading American scholars of Dutch painting before his appointment as director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1983.