The Goudstikker Collection of Amsterdam

In 1919 Jacques Goudstikker (1897–1940) took over the Amsterdam art dealership his father had run and set about transforming it into one of the most internationally minded galleries in the Netherlands. He incorporated the business, appointed himself director, and began publishing catalogues in French rather than Dutch, a deliberate signal that he was dealing across borders. Among his first moves was a touring exhibition of selected works from the gallery’s stock: “La Collection Goudstikker d’Amsterdam,“ which opened at Pulchri Studio in The Hague in late 1919 and subsequently travelled to Copenhagen (January 1920), Stockholm (February 1920), Oslo (March 1920), and Rotterdam (May to June 1920). The Hague catalogue listed 144 paintings, each numbered and many illustrated, making this one of the most ambitious commercial touring exhibitions mounted in the Netherlands immediately after the First World War.

The work now known as “Girl with a Flute” appeared in the Hague catalogue as no. 131. At the time it belonged to the estate of August Janssen, the Amsterdam collector who had acquired it from the de Grez collection in Brussels around 1916 and who died in 1918; Goudstikker appears to have handled it on behalf of the estate. The painting passed to Knoedler & Co. and Frederick Muller & Co. jointly in 1921 and was purchased by Joseph E. Widener in 1923, eventually entering the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 1942. In 2022 the NGA reattributed the work to the “Studio of Johannes Vermeer.”