Mauritshuis, Dutch Paintings of the Golden Age

In the spring of 1982, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC hosted a major loan exhibition drawn from the Mauritshuis in The Hague, one of the world’s most concentrated collections of Dutch Golden Age painting. The Mauritshuis was undergoing renovation during this period, and the National Gallery provided a distinguished American venue for some of its greatest treasures while the Dutch museum was partially closed to the public. The exhibition ran for more than six months, from 23 April to 31 October 1982, reflecting its scale and the significance of the loans.

The selection brought together canonical works of the seventeenth-century Dutch tradition, including Rembrandt van Rijn’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp“ (1632), Jan Steen’s ”The Way You Hear It, Is the Way You Sing It,“ and Vermeer’s ”Girl with a Pearl Earring“ (c. 1665). Together these paintings represented the full range of the Golden Age achievement in portraiture, genre, and history painting, introduced to Washington audiences through one of the most comprehensive displays of Mauritshuis holdings ever assembled outside the Netherlands.

Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” occupied a special place in the exhibition. The painting depicts a young woman in three-quarter view, wearing a blue and yellow headscarf and a large luminous pearl earring, her lips slightly parted as if about to speak. Often described as a tronie, a character study rather than a formal portrait, it had entered the Mauritshuis collection in 1902 and was already recognised as one of Vermeer’s finest works. In 1982, however, it had not yet attained the global celebrity it would later acquire, making this Washington showing one of the most significant early opportunities for American audiences to encounter the painting in person.

The exhibition was an important moment in the transatlantic life of the Mauritshuis collection and contributed to growing international recognition of “Girl with a Pearl Earring” as a masterpiece of European painting. The painting has since been called the “Mona Lisa of the North,“ a phrase that captures both its extraordinary popular appeal and the enigmatic quality of its subject’s gaze.