Retrospective Exhibition of Old Master Paintings Lent from Private Collections

Held in May 1866 at the Palais des Champs-Élysées, this loan exhibition drew old master paintings from Parisian private collections and presented eleven works then attributed to Vermeer. Of those eleven, only four are now considered authentic: Woman with a Pearl Necklace, The Geographer, A Lady Standing at a Virginal, and Officer and Laughing Girl. The remaining seven attributions have since been rejected.

The exhibition was closely connected to the French critic Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré, who wrote under the Dutch-sounding pseudonym W. Bürger (a name he adopted during his political exile in Belgium and the Netherlands in the 1850s). Thoré played an important advisory role behind the scenes of the show, and several of the Vermeer paintings came from his own collection, including Woman with a Pearl Necklace and A Lady Standing at a Virginal. Later the same year, between October and December 1866, he published his landmark three-part study “Van der Meer de Delft” in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, in which he catalogued over 73 works and firmly attributed approximately 45 to Vermeer, establishing the foundation of the painter’s modern scholarly reputation.

Thoré’s interest in Vermeer had begun in 1842, when he encountered the View of Delft at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. He spent more than two decades gathering attributions and tracking down works across European collections before the 1866 exhibition and articles appeared together as the culmination of that effort. At the time of the exhibition, Vermeer’s name was, in Thoré’s own words, “missing from the biographies and histories of painting.”