Loan to display with permanent collection

This brief Mauritshuis loan marked the first time “Girl with a Flute” was displayed publicly in a museum. The painting had been in the Brussels collection of Jean de Grez (1837-1910), where Abraham Bredius, then director of the Mauritshuis, discovered and identified it as a Vermeer in 1906. Bredius arranged to borrow the work for display alongside the museum’s permanent collection the following year, bringing it before a public audience for the first time.

After de Grez’s death, the painting was sold in 1916 to Amsterdam collector August Janssen, and following Janssen’s death in 1918, it passed through dealers before Knoedler & Co. in New York sold it in 1923 to Joseph E. Widener of Philadelphia. Widener donated it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1942, where it remains today. In October 2022 the NGA revised the attribution from Johannes Vermeer to “Studio of Johannes Vermeer,” following technical and material analysis conducted during the museum’s COVID-19 closure.