Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century

In November 1953, the Kunsthaus Zürich mounted a major survey of Dutch Golden Age painting under the title “Holländer des 17. Jahrhunderts,” drawing on loans from leading museum collections across the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany. The exhibition presented some of the finest works of the seventeenth-century Dutch school to Swiss audiences in what was one of the most ambitious international loan exhibitions the Kunsthaus had organized in the postwar period.

Among the highlights were five paintings by Johannes Vermeer, an extraordinary concentration that placed this exhibition among the most significant gatherings of his work in the twentieth century. The loans came from five different institutions: the Mauritshuis in The Hague (“Diana and Her Companions”), the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (“The Milkmaid“), the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (”The Art of Painting“), the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig (”The Girl with a Wine Glass“), and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (”The Glass of Wine“). That Dutch, Austrian, and German institutions agreed to lend so freely just eight years after the end of the Second World War speaks to the cultural confidence and cooperative spirit of postwar European museum networks.

Five Vermeers together was a rarity at the time. Only a handful of exhibitions across the entire history of Vermeer scholarship had brought together this many of his works, and for Zürich audiences the opportunity to see paintings normally spread across four countries in a single gallery was exceptional. The selection spanned the range of Vermeer’s output, from the early mythological composition “Diana and Her Companions“ to the intimate domestic interiors he became celebrated for, offering a rare overview of his development as a painter.

The Kunsthaus Zürich, founded in 1910 on the Heimplatz, had by the 1950s established itself as one of Switzerland’s foremost venues for international loan exhibitions of historical and modern art. Its program of Dutch and Flemish Old Master shows reflected both the strength of Swiss collecting in this field and the institution’s ambition to bring major works of European heritage to its public.