The Goudstikker Collection of Amsterdam

The Oslo showing was the fourth stop on Jacques Goudstikker’s ambitious five-city tour of his Amsterdam gallery’s collection. After presentations in The Hague (November 1919), Copenhagen (January 1920), and Stockholm (February 1920), the exhibition arrived in Oslo for the month of March 1920, before closing in Rotterdam in May and June. Goudstikker had reorganised his family’s gallery in 1919 and adopted French-language catalogues as a signal of international reach, making the tour one of the earliest sustained efforts to bring Old Master paintings from the Amsterdam market to Scandinavian audiences.

The host venue, the Oslo Kunstforening (Oslo Art Association), was founded in 1836 as Christiania Kunstforening and is the oldest art institution in Norway. Modelled on the German Kunstverein tradition, it provided the capital’s first permanent site for temporary exhibitions before the National Gallery of Norway existed. By 1920 it had long been established as Oslo’s principal venue for showing visiting collections. The Girl with a Flute appeared at the Oslo showing but was not listed in the printed exhibition catalogue.

The painting had come to Goudstikker through the estate of August Janssen, an Amsterdam dealer who acquired it from the Brussels collection of Jean de Grez around 1916. After the tour, Goudstikker and Frederick Muller sold the work to Knoedler and Co. in April 1921; Philadelphia collector Joseph Widener purchased it in February 1923 and bequeathed it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1942. In October 2022 the NGA reattributed the panel to “Studio of Johannes Vermeer” following technical analysis of its pigment grinding and brushwork.