Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, Washington

In early 1999, the National Gallery of Art in Washington lent a substantial selection of European paintings from its permanent collection for a two-venue tour of Japan. The exhibition opened at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art on 30 January and ran through 4 April 1999, before traveling to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, where it remained on view from 17 April through 11 July. The tour was organized jointly by the Yomiuri Shimbun, the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, under the title “米国が誇る西洋絵画の殿堂” (The Pride of America: A Treasury of Western Painting). It was one of the most ambitious loans the NGA had mounted for a Japanese audience up to that point. Note that the museum slug here records the later venue administered under the National Art Center umbrella; the actual 1999 host in Tokyo was the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (Ueno).

The exhibition brought together paintings spanning several centuries and schools of Western art, drawn from the NGA collection assembled largely through the Mellon, Widener, and Havemeyer gifts. Vermeer’s “A Lady Writing“ (c. 1665) appeared in the catalogue as no. 83. The painting had entered the NGA in 1962 as a gift in memory of their father from Harry Waldron Havemeyer and Horace Havemeyer, Jr., making it one of the Washington museum’s most prized Dutch Golden Age holdings. Set against a warm interior light, the work shows a woman pausing mid-letter, her pearl necklace and yellow fur-trimmed jacket signaling prosperity, while the casual intimacy of the moment reflects Vermeer’s sustained interest in the private life of educated, affluent Delft households.

For Japanese audiences in 1999, the loan offered a rare opportunity to encounter this cabinet-scale domestic scene outside the United States. The painting had seldom traveled internationally, and its inclusion among the exhibition’s highlights confirmed its status as one of the NGA’s signature Dutch works. The catalogue entry at no. 83, illustrated in full, provided the most detailed published presentation of the picture available in Japanese at the time.