"The Milkmaid" by Vermeer and Dutch Genre Painting: Masterworks from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The National Art Center

In the autumn of 2007 the National Art Center in Tokyo hosted one of the most anticipated Dutch art exhibitions to visit Japan, presenting Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” (De melkmeid) as the centrepiece of a selection of Dutch Golden Age genre masterworks drawn from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Running from 26 September to 17 December, the exhibition drew Japanese audiences eager to encounter a painting widely regarded as among the most perfect distillations of seventeenth-century Dutch domestic life.

The show was made possible by the Rijksmuseum’s decade-long renovation programme, which ran from 2003 to 2013. Rather than allow its most celebrated holdings to remain inaccessible during the building works, the museum organised a series of international travelling exhibitions under the banner of its “best of” collection, bringing iconic works to audiences across Europe, North America, and Asia. Tokyo was among the most prominent destinations, reflecting the remarkable growth of Japanese interest in Vermeer and Dutch painting through the late 1990s and 2000s.

The exhibition was co-organised with the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest-circulation newspaper and a longstanding partner in bringing major Western art exhibitions to Japanese venues. The National Art Center itself had only opened earlier in 2007, and the show helped establish the Roppongi institution, designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa with its celebrated undulating glass facade, as a serious destination for international loan exhibitions of the first rank.

Alongside “The Milkmaid,” the presentation featured other Rijksmuseum Dutch genre paintings, placing Vermeer’s luminous kitchen scene within the broader tradition of seventeenth-century scenes of everyday life. For many Japanese visitors the exhibition offered a rare opportunity to see the original canvas at close range, its cool light and monumental stillness fully apparent only in the presence of the work itself.