The Goudstikker Collection of Amsterdam. Academie van Beeldende Kunsten

Rotterdam was the fifth and final stop of Jacques Goudstikker’s ambitious Northern European tour. Having reorganised his Amsterdam gallery in 1919 and adopted French-language catalogues to signal a more cosmopolitan identity, Goudstikker sent a substantial selection of his stock to The Hague (November 1919), Copenhagen (January 1920), Stockholm (February 1920), and Oslo (March 1920) before the collection arrived at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen in Rotterdam in May 1920 for a two-month run through late June.

The small panel then attributed to Vermeer and now known as Girl with a Flute appeared in the Rotterdam catalogue as no. 19, illustrated. It had been in the estate of the Amsterdam dealer August Janssen (d. 1918), and Goudstikker was acting as exhibiting agent for the work during the tour. Within a year of the Rotterdam showing, Goudstikker and Frederick Muller sold the painting to Knoedler and Co. (April 1921); the 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.”