Illustrated Catalogue of 300 Paintings by Old Masters of the Dutch, Flemish, French, and English Schools, Being Some of the Principal Pictures Which Have at Various Times Formed Part of the Sedelmeyer Gallery

Published in 1898 by the Austrian-born Paris dealer Charles Sedelmeyer from his gallery at 6 rue de La Rochefoucauld, this illustrated catalogue was not a record of works then on the market but a retrospective survey. Its preface describes it as “a selection from those pictures by old masters, which I had owned and sold prior to 1894,“ making it in effect a ledger of the gallery’s most notable transactions over the preceding decades. Four Vermeers appeared as nos. 85 to 88, each illustrated, testimony to how many of the artist’s paintings had passed through a single dealer’s hands in the late nineteenth century.

The four works represent distinct chapters in Vermeer’s modern reception. The Geographer (no. 87) had been with Sedelmeyer around 1875, when he sold it to Prince Demidoff di San Donato; it eventually reached the Städel in Frankfurt in 1885. A Maid Asleep (no. 88, listed as “The Sleeping Servant”) and Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid (no. 86, listed as “The Billet-doux”) both passed through the gallery in 1881: the former was sold that same year to the Paris collector Rodolphe Kann, while the latter went to E. Secretan, whose celebrated collection was dispersed at auction in 1889. A Lady Seated at a Virginal (no. 85) came to Sedelmeyer at the Thoré-Bürger sale in December 1892 and was sold to Lawrie and Co. of London in February 1893; it later entered the collection of George Salting and, through his bequest, the National Gallery, London, in 1910.

The catalogue is digitised and freely available on Internet Archive. Its publication coincided with Sedelmeyer’s broader series of illustrated sales catalogues, which ran from the 1890s into the early twentieth century and served as a vehicle for reaching wealthy collectors in Britain and America as much as a record of past activity.