Masterpieces of the Dutch School from the Collection of H.M. the King of England on the Occasion of 50-year Reign of Queen Wilhelmina

This exhibition at the Mauritshuis opened on 6 August 1948 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Wilhelmina’s accession to the throne of the Netherlands. Wilhelmina had come to power on 6 September 1898 at the age of eighteen, reigning through two world wars, five years of German occupation, and a period in wartime exile in London, where the British royal family and government had given her crucial support. The loan of Dutch masterpieces from King George VI’s collection to the Mauritshuis for this occasion was a gesture of Anglo-Dutch friendship at the close of a reign that had come to symbolise Dutch national resilience.

The exhibition drew on the British Royal Collection, one of the great repositories of seventeenth-century Dutch painting outside the Netherlands. Its core Dutch holdings entered the collection in 1762, when King George III purchased the entire collection of Joseph Smith, the English consul in Venice, which included works by Rembrandt, Gerrit Dou, Jan Steen, and Vermeer. Smith had himself acquired Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson“ around 1742, possibly from the estate of the Venetian painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, who had bought it in the Low Countries around 1718. When Vermeer died in 1675 the painting had passed through the estate auction of Jacob Dissius in Delft (1696) before making its way to Venice. George III received it under the name of Frans van Mieris the Elder; it was not correctly reattributed to Vermeer until 1866, by the French critic Théophile Thoré.

The presence of “The Music Lesson” at the Mauritshuis in the summer of 1948 meant that one of Vermeer’s finest interiors had returned briefly to Dutch soil, displayed in the national museum of Dutch Golden Age painting in the city of The Hague. Wilhelmina abdicated on 4 September 1948, just days after the exhibition closed, passing the crown to her daughter Juliana, and the show thus fell within the final weeks of a reign of fifty years.