Masterpieces from the Museums of the United States, from Giorgione to Picasso

From October to December 1976, the Musée Marmottan in Paris hosted an exhibition of masterpieces drawn from American museum collections, spanning five centuries of Western painting from the Venetian Renaissance to the early twentieth century. Organised by the Armand Hammer Foundation, the show assembled loans from major institutions across the United States. The accompanying catalogue was compiled by François Daulte, the Swiss art historian and specialist in French Impressionism who also served as director of the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne. The exhibition ran for just under two months, closing on 5 December 1976.

Vermeer’s A Lady Writing (c. 1665), on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, appeared as catalogue number 18. The painting, acquired by the NGA in 1962 as a gift from Harry Waldron Havemeyer and Horace Havemeyer Jr. in memory of their father Horace Havemeyer, depicts a young woman pausing at a writing table, her gaze turned toward the viewer mid-sentence. Alongside it, the exhibition included a Rembrandt portrait (catalogue number 17) and works spanning from Giorgione and other Renaissance masters through to Picasso, offering Parisian audiences a rare survey of the strength of American public collections assembled during the preceding decades.

The show took place in the same year that a parallel selection of American-held European and American paintings toured Soviet institutions, including the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Together these two loan programmes reflected the growing confidence of American museums in presenting their collections internationally during the 1970s, and the appetite of European audiences to see works that had migrated to the United States during the earlier part of the century.