The Goudstikker Collection of Amsterdam

This was the third stop of a five-city Northern European tour organised by Jacques Goudstikker, the Amsterdam dealer who had taken over and modernised his family gallery in 1919. The circuit ran from The Hague in June 1919 through Copenhagen (January 1920), Stockholm (February 1920), Oslo (March 1920), and Rotterdam (May–June 1920), presenting a selection of old master paintings under the French-language title “La Collection Goudstikker d’Amsterdam.“ Goudstikker’s early practice of publishing catalogues in French rather than Dutch signalled his ambition to reach an international audience, and the Scandinavian leg of the tour was a direct expression of that strategy.

The painting now known as Girl with a Flutewas included at each venue, though it does not appear to have been assigned a catalogue number for the Stockholm showing. At the time the work was held by the Amsterdam collector August Janssen (who had acquired it from the de Grez collection in 1916 and died in 1918, leaving his estate to be wound down), with Goudstikker acting as the agent for its public display. The painting left Goudstikker’s orbit shortly after the tour concluded: Knoedler & Co. of New York handled the sale in 1921 and it passed to Joseph E. Widener, eventually entering the National Gallery of Art in Washington as part of the Widener bequest in 1942.

The attribution has shifted considerably since the tour. The painting was shown as a Vermeer in 1920, but in October 2022 the National Gallery of Art announced, following new technical analysis, that it was the work of an unidentified artist in Vermeer’s studio rather than by Vermeer himself. It is now catalogued as “Studio of Johannes Vermeer.”