Frick’s Vermeers
Reunited
Extended through November 23, 2008
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Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), Girl Interrupted at Her
Music, c. 1658–59, oil on canvas, The Frick Collection |
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Henry Clay Frick bought his first Vermeer,
Girl Interrupted at Her Music, in the summer
of 1901, when he was still living in Pittsburgh.
He had started buying large numbers of
pictures by the mid-1890s, the great majority
of which belonged to the modern French
schools. These were conventional contemporary
works of the sort that were sought out
by fellow collectors in Pittsburgh, New York,
Boston, and elsewhere in the United States.
It was not until 1896 that Frick acquired
his first Old Master picture, Still Life with
Fruit by Jan van Os, a minor eighteenth-century
Dutch painter, for which he paid
$1,000. (The painting is now at the Frick
Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh.) By
1901, he owned a handful of Old Masters;
among these, most notably, was Portrait of
a Young Artist of about 1647, supposedly
by Rembrandt, purchased in 1899 for the
considerable sum of $38,000. (The painting
remains in The Frick Collection, although it is now attributed to an unknown follower
of Rembrandt.)
By all accounts, Frick’s 1901 acquisition
of Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music seems to have been a wise although not
a calculated decision. Perhaps his interest
in the picture was sparked by the recent
attention received by Vermeer’s work, both
in America and in Europe, or even by the
growing fame of Théophile Thoré. Certainly,
Frick (or his dealer, Charles Carstairs of
Knoedler) may have been drawn to the Girl
Interrupted at Her Music for purely aesthetic
reasons. Whatever his motivation, Frick paid
Knoedler $26,000 for the Vermeer, a high
price when compared to the amounts his
contemporaries had spent for their Vermeers
about this time. As was the common practice,
the Girl Interrupted at Her Music, which
had been in a private collection in Britain
for almost a half century, was thoroughly
cleaned shortly before it was sold. As a result,
a violin hanging on the back wall, described
in the 1810 auction catalogue, was removed by
the restorer, who judged it a later addition.
The birdcage to the right of the window,
which may not be original to the painting
either, was left intact. Although Frick
probably was not aware of the fact, the Girl
Interrupted at Her Music was only the fourth
authentic Vermeer to come to America.
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Vermeer, Officer and Laughing Girl, c. 1657, oil on
canvas, The Frick Collection |
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Frick bought his second Vermeer a decade
later, in 1911 — one of the best years ever for
the sale of Old Masters in America. By then,
Frick was living in New York, where he had
rapidly established himself as one of the
world’s great collectors of Old Masters, paying
top prices for major Dutch works such
as Rembrandt’s 1658 Self-Portrait, purchased
in 1906 for $225,000, and his Polish Rider, acquired in 1910 for nearly $300,000. Prices
for Vermeer had jumped spectacularly in
the century’s first decade, and a few hundred
dollars, or even a few thousand, for one of the
artist’s rare works was, by now, unthinkable.
Early in 1911, the industrialist P. A. B.
Widener of Philadelphia — who was a business
acquaintance of Frick’s as well as one of
his major collecting rivals — paid $115,000 and
exchanged four paintings for a recently discovered
Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).
Later that year, Frick paid Knoedler almost
twice that amount for the exquisite Officer
and Laughing Girl, thereby setting a new
record price for a Vermeer. Interestingly,
Frick returned a pair of early Rembrandt
portraits to his dealer shortly before he made
his second Vermeer purchase; he received a
credit of $175,000 for the Rembrandt pendants,
which was then taken as a first payment
for the Officer and Laughing Girl. It
was around this time that Wilhelm Bode, the
distinguished German scholar and museum
director, wrote in The New York Times that a
painting by Vermeer was “the greatest treasure
for an American collector.” According
to Bode, Vermeer’s extreme popularity was
due, in part, to the fact that his feeling for
light and color came especially close to “our
modern feeling” and also because his paintings
were so extraordinarily rare.
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Vermeer, Mistress and Maid, c. 1666–67, oil on
canvas, The Frick Collection |
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Not long afterward Frick was on the
lookout for a third Vermeer. In the spring of
1914, the London dealer Arthur Sulley wrote
on his behalf to James Simon, a well-known
Berlin collector, asking if he would sell his
celebrated Vermeer, Mistress and Maid, for £50,000 (about $250,000). Simon, however,
showed no interest in parting with the pearl of his collection, as Sulley reported
to Frick: “He replies that no offer would
tempt him to sell the Vermeer, and that
he has already refused an offer of £50,000
several times.” A few years later, however,
a reversal of fortune — occasioned by the
devastation of World War I — forced Simon
to sell many of his paintings. In 1919, with
the help of the dealer Joseph Duveen, Frick
bought Simon’s cherished Vermeer, paying
more than $290,000. Mistress and Maid was Frick’s last purchase, and the only one
he made in the year of his death. Although
he was able to enjoy his third Vermeer only briefly, it was one of his personal
favorites.
— Esmée Quodbach,
Assistant to the Director of the Center for the History of
Collecting in America |
