Young Woman Seated at a Virginals

For nearly nine months in 2012, the Ashmolean Museum displayed Vermeer’s A Young Woman Seated at a Virginals on extended loan from The Leiden Collection, the private holdings of American collector Thomas S. Kaplan. At the time it was widely regarded as the only work by Vermeer in private hands, lending the loan particular significance. The painting was installed in the museum’s Dutch Art Gallery under the direction of Dr. Christopher Brown, the Ashmolean’s director and a leading authority on Dutch and Flemish painting, and admission was free to all visitors.

The Vermeer was shown alongside other Dutch Golden Age works from the same private collection and from the museum’s own holdings, including portraits by Frans Hals, landscapes by Albert Cuyp and Jacob van Ruisdael, and genre scenes by Gabriel Metsu, as well as Delftware ceramics and decorative arts that situated the painting within the material culture of seventeenth-century Holland. The extended nine-month run gave Oxford visitors and scholars sustained access to a canvas that had been largely outside public reach since its sale at Sotheby’s London in 2004.

The attribution of A Young Woman Seated at a Virginals has a layered history. Technical examinations in the 1990s established material similarities with Vermeer’s late paintings, including the use of natural ultramarine and a canvas weave matching that of The Lacemaker, and the work was firmly reattributed following its 2004 auction. Kaplan acquired the painting in 2008. The Ashmolean loan was part of a broader lending programme from The Leiden Collection to prominent institutions, and the painting went on to appear in major Vermeer exhibitions in Rome, London, Paris, and the Netherlands in subsequent years.