Dutch Paintings of the Golden Age from the Royal Picture Gallery

In the spring of 1984, the National Museum of Western Art in Ueno, Tokyo, presented a major loan exhibition of Dutch Golden Age paintings drawn from the Mauritshuis in The Hague, one of the foremost royal picture galleries in Europe. The show brought together approximately forty works spanning the full breadth of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, from the intimate domestic scenes and portraits for which the period is celebrated to history paintings and landscapes. It followed directly on the heels of a celebrated American tour (1982–83) that had called at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, giving Japanese audiences their first opportunity to see the same ensemble of masterpieces.

Two works by Vermeer anchored the exhibition: “Diana and Her Companions“ (catalogue no. 39) and ”Girl with a Pearl Earring“ (catalogue no. 40), both lent directly from the Mauritshuis. The latter painting was still catalogued under its older title “Head of a Girl” at this time, the now-universal name “Girl with a Pearl Earring” having not yet fully supplanted earlier usage. Alongside the two Vermeers, the exhibition presented major works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Frans Hals, and other leading masters of the Dutch Republic, offering a panoramic view of the extraordinary generation of painters active in the Netherlands between roughly 1600 and 1700.

The exhibition reflected the long-standing cultural ties between Japan and the Netherlands, a relationship rooted in the unique trading contact the Dutch maintained with Japan through Dejima during the Edo period when the country was otherwise closed to Western influence. By the 1980s, Japanese museums were among the most ambitious international borrowers of Dutch and Flemish old masters, and the National Museum of Western Art, itself the inheritor of the Matsukata Collection of European art, was a natural host for such a survey. The Mauritshuis would not mount another comparable touring exhibition to Japan until 2012, when it lent nearly fifty works to Tokyo and Kobe during its renovation closure, making the 1984 showing a significant early chapter in that bilateral relationship.