Johannes Vermeer Vom Innehalten Curators Talk with Xavier Salomon Frick Collection New York

This is the so-called Girl Interrupted at the Music, and what I will do is I will talk about its history in America, how it got to the Frick, and talk a little bit about Frick as a collector and as a collector of Vermeer. We have three Vermeers in our collection and I will talk briefly about them in a second, but I would like then to shift the focus to this painting in particular and to a number of very interesting issues and question marks. Often with Vermeer paintings we have more questions than answers. I think the presence of this painting in Dresden right now is doing this painting a huge service in terms of rethinking a lot of issues to do with, you know, what is this painting about, what is the date of this painting, to re-analyse the condition, the physical condition of this work that I would like to talk about a little bit, and also to finish off with some of the research that we hope to carry out on this picture in the future. So many of the questions to the answers that I will come up with, many of the answers to the questions I will come up with today, hopefully we will have in the future. So the painting is the first of three Vermeers to enter the collection of the Frick, of the museum. Out of the 35-36 Vermeers in the world, we're very lucky to have three, which for a museum our size is pretty extraordinary. But it's also extraordinary to think about American collectors acquiring Vermeers in the early 20th century mainly, at a time when Vermeer was effectively being rediscovered at the end of the 19th century. Before that he was still a very mysterious artist for the Western world. Our painting, interestingly enough, since it is first known, which was in 1810, has always had an attribution to Vermeer and that always remained more or less attached to the painting, which is not the case of other Vermeer paintings, which as you have heard I'm sure in the other lectures, and you will hear in the future, have changed attributions a number of times and were attributed to a number of other Dutch artists before reaching the final Vermeer attribution. Now, our Vermeer, The Girl Interrupted at Her Music, was acquired by Henry Clay Frick, the founder of the collection, on the 25th of July 1901. And he actually acquired it in Paris. Frick at the time was on holiday in Europe and he was staying at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. And this was presented to him by a dealer, the dealer Knoedler, and he decided to purchase it. And it was the first Vermeer he acquired at a time in his collecting where he had acquired mostly contemporary art. And here you see Frick himself in a contemporary portrait. This is the receipt of the painting and this actually is a receipt that shows you a number of works that Frick was acquiring around that time. And there were contemporary works by late Impressionist pictures like Fritz Taulov, who was a Norwegian painter, Israels, but there are also other Dutch paintings from the Golden Age, from the Gilded Age, from the seventeenth century, like the Waldemar's Cavalry Camp. And here you see the prices. And, of course, the Vermeer was one of the most expensive pictures he bought in this lot, at $26,000, but still not a very high price compared to other works that Frick acquired around that time. And to give you a sense of how valuable Vermeer was becoming at that time, in 1901 Frick pays $26,000 for Girl Interrupted at the Musick. Ten years later, in 1911, for another Vermeer that we'll see in a second, Officer and Laughing Girl, he pays exactly ten times more. So the value of these works, that is $225,000 for the Officer and Laughing Girl, is growing exponentially as he's acquiring and collecting Vermeer. The history of Girl Interrupted as we know it is fairly straightforward. From 1810 onwards it belonged to a number of collections in the Netherlands. As I say, it first appears at an auction sale in Amsterdam on the 1st of August 1810, when it belonged to a man called Pieter de Smyth van Alphen. The collection of Pieter de Smyth van Alphen comes up at auction in 1810. The Vermeer, interestingly enough, goes unsold. No one buys it. It's in the collection of this man, and it's also described, very interestingly at the time, by Reynolds, the English painter who visits Amsterdam and sees the collection of de Smyth van Alphen, and describes Vermeer in it. Soon after, a year later, 1811, September 1811, the painting comes up for auction again, and at this time it belonged to someone else, a man called Henry Curzer in Amsterdam, and this time it sells for very little, but it sells to Cornelis Ross, who then, about ten years later in 1820, sells it again, and the painting ends up in England in the United Kingdom. It's in the collection of Samuel Woodburn, who in 1853 sells his collection to... This painting ends up with Francis Gibson and then with his daughter, Mrs. Louis Frye, who keeps it until she sells it through Knoedler to Frick in 1901. So we know that the painting is in the Netherlands probably all along up to 1820, more or less, and that then it is in the United Kingdom and Frick buys it via Paris from England. Frick travels at this point, and we'll talk a little bit more about this in a second, but he is living in 1901 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That is where he's from and that's where his collection is. This is before he decides to move in 1905 to New York, and he travels with his paintings backwards and forwards on his private train, the Westmoreland, between Pittsburgh and his beach house at Eagle Rock. The list I'm showing you on the left from our archives from May 3rd, 1911, it shows how at this point Frick is based in New York, but he is moving pictures between his residences, and there's a list here of the paintings, the 38 paintings he is shipping to his beach house for the summer, and you can see as you go through the list that there is among them Vermeer. There's one Vermeer, which of course is at that point the girl interrupted at the music, and you see here a slide of Frick with one of his granddaughters at Eagle Rock, his country house, his beach house, and below you see one of the big British pictures, a Romney, being moved into the summer house as things are moved backwards and forwards between the houses. And this is to say that Frick lent the Vermeer somewhat generously, actually. He lent it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a while in 1909. He lent it again to the MFA, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in 1910. And in 1904, rather interestingly, he lends the Vermeer, together with a Reisdell and a Daubigny view of Pierre, to the World's Art Fair in St. Louis in America. And I'm not entirely sure why the selection of these three paintings was made, but these are the three pictures that Frick contributes to the World's Fair. So you have to imagine that between 1901 and Frick's death in 1919, the Vermeer traveled a number of times. It hasn't traveled since, so from 1919 onwards, the picture has remained at the Frick, and its trip to Dresden is the first time that it can be seen in a broader context, which, as I hope to demonstrate in this lecture, has been very important for us and for the Vermeer studies more broadly. This is where the Frick usually resides. This is the Frick Collection, the house that Henry Clay Frick built in the 1910s, between 1912 and 1914. It is on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, overlooking Central Park. This is what we now know as the Frick Collection. As Uta mentioned, the building is undergoing renovation and enhancements right now and will be closed for the next couple of years, and we are currently in a temporary location that I will discuss in a minute. But this is where the Vermeer usually is, and where it usually hangs is in the West Gallery, the Grand Picture Gallery. And here you see an image from probably 1927 after Frick's death, but it shows more or less how it was during his lifetime. And you see to the left on the north wall of the gallery two of the Vermeers, one on top of the other. So you see the girl interrupted at her music above, the mistress and maid below. And this gallery had a double hang all the way probably until the 1930s, 40s. And here you see another image of the same room with the end wall to the right with Goya, Velázquez, and El Greco, the great Van Dyck surrounded by two Van Dyck portraits in the middle. And again, immediately to the right of one of those Van Dycks, you see again the two Vermeers. This is where they usually hang today in the south hall of the house at 170th Street. And here again you see the girl interrupted at her music on the right with Officer and Laughing Girl, the picture that Frick acquired in 1911, on the left, flanking in this case a Murillo self-portrait, which is a very recent acquisition in the collection, even though it originally also belonged to Henry Clay Frick. So this is just to give you a sense of the home of these Vermeers. But how they got to the Frick all begins from this rather unassuming small house. And this is the summer house at the Overholt House in West Overton in western Pennsylvania, which is the site where Henry Clay Frick was born on the 19th of It is not quite a rag-to-riches story of a poor man that makes his fortune in America, because in fact Frick's father and mother were fairly well off at the time by the standards of where they lived. And you see here that the little summer house as it stands is actually next to a sort of rather grand house which belonged to the Overholt family. Frick was of Germanic origins. The Overholt family was from the Rhine area and they had moved to the United States a couple of generations before. The Frick family was from Switzerland, the German part of Switzerland, and they had also moved a few generations before to America, to Pennsylvania. And so this is the maternal house of Frick's maternal grandparents, which is where he grows up. And his grandfather had a whiskey distillery. Overholt Whiskey still exists to this day. And this is where Frick grew up and where he started working in the whiskey distillery of his grandfather. But very quickly, he focuses on the production of Coke. And Coke is a byproduct of coal, which is used especially at this point in America in the late 19th century to produce steel. And of course, this is a great moment where it's been calculated that almost 90 percent of all the steel in the world comes from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at that point. Frick is very interested in the arts as a young man. Here you see him on the right in an early photo from probably the 1870s, 1880s. And it is a famous story that when he first applies for a loan to get his business going, the person granting the loan writes back saying that the only risk with this loan is that Frick may be a little too enthusiastic about pictures, but not enough to hurt. So he's already buying works of art as a young man. He makes a million at age 30 and goes on to become the most successful producer of Coke. He builds the Henry Clay Frick Coke Company and then partners with Andrew Carnegie with the Carnegie Steel production at the time in Pittsburgh. And this is just as a reminder of this is one of the remaining factories in Pittsburgh, which was run by the Carnegie Frick Company. Most of them were demolished at different points, but here you see one of them remaining in ruins currently in Pittsburgh. This is where the fortune of the Frick family comes from. And in 1881, Henry Clay Frick settles down. He marries Adelaide Howard Childs and the two move in an elegant new house in Pittsburgh. But of course, the family life is also going along with the business life. And the 1890s, as successful as Frick is in terms of his business, become very difficult in a number of ways. Frick is involved with a number of strikes around the Carnegie Frick plants, which develop into one of the most disturbing and tragic events of labor history in the United States in 1892. And that is the so-called Homestead Strike and the Homestead Battle, where the striking workers and private police clash outside one of the plants and there are dead people on both sides and a lot of wounded people. And this is really a terrible year for Frick because it's also the year of an assassination attempt on his part. And here you see a newspaper image at the time. An anarchist walked into his office with a gun and a knife and shot him twice and stabbed him. And here you see the event as reconstructed in a newspaper from the time. But also this 1891-92 is the year when two of his four children, Martha and Henry Clay Frick Jr., die, one as an infant, one as a young child. So Frick's interest in collecting really develops from the 1890s, effectively, in a new and more powerful way. He enlarges his house in Pittsburgh, and here you see the house of Clayton. This is a historical photograph of the house. This is how the house appears today. It is open to the public. And this is the house where the veneer first was displayed when Frick acquired it. Here you see the interior of the house. This is Frick's office. Just to give a sense of, you know, this typical end of the 19th century house in an American city, where contemporary art and sculpture and books and a number of other things are combined. And, of course, this is the first great place where Frick is putting his collection together. But in 1905, he decides to move to New York, and he first rents this building. This is the house of the Vanderbilt family on Fifth Avenue, which, for a number of reasons, the Vanderbilts lease out to Frick and his family for 10 years. Frick, at this point, begins to have a very important collection. By 1905, he already has a painting he believes to be by Rembrandt, even though it's now believed to be by one of his followers, a number of English portraits, a number of Dutch and Flemish works, a number of contemporary paintings by the Barbizon School and by Impressionists. When Bernard Berenson visits Frick in January 1904, he describes to his wife a collection including a very fine Terborg, Rembrandt, Watts, besides the usual more or less boring Barbizon School. So that kind of gives a glimpse of what the collection is at this point. By the time Frick moves to New York, he has fallen out with Carnegie. He has bought his share of the company out. He is effectively retired and really starts focusing majorly on the collecting of paintings. The Vermeer is an exception because the Vermeer is one of the early old masters he buys in 1901 while still in Pittsburgh. By the time he's in New York, this reaches a whole together new level. Around this time in the early 1900s, 1902 to 1905, he builds this modest house by the beach, Eagle Rock. This becomes the main summer residence of the Frick family on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Here you see a photograph of the house. And after that, he begins to plan his own house in New York. And this is an early plan of what is today the Frick Collection by the architect Thomas Hastings. This is one of the early plans from 1912. It was a big Italian-age palazzo, but Frick scales it down to a more reasonable French 18th-century style house. Here you see the house as it's being built between 70th and 71st Street. Here you see the Grand Picture Gallery, very much influenced by the Wallace Collection Gallery, where Frick was to keep his great paintings. And here you see the gallery as ultimately completed. And again, you see a combination of paintings. In this case, again, Van Dyck, Obama, Franz Hals, Veronese, and the Vermeers were on the right wall, which I showed you before. This house is bequeathed by Frick at his death as a public museum, which will eventually become the Frick Collection. And so here you see a posthumous portrait of Frick in his gallery, in this case with Velázquez and El Greco. But he lived with his paintings for most of his late life. For the last five years of his life, between 1914 and 1919, he's living at the house that he will then leave as a museum. So Girl Interrupted at Her Music is, as I mentioned, the first of the three Vermeers that Frick buys. Its title in itself is a title that is made up in recent times. The problem of Vermeer titles is something we should think about. You know, it's very difficult to give titles to these works because often we don't know what is going on in the pictures. The Dresden picture is, of course, a woman reading a letter. This is the girl interrupted at her music. What is actually happening in this picture we'll talk about in a second. But just to mention that when it is bought in 1901, the title of this painting is The Music Lesson, and it only then changes to Girl Interrupted at Her Music or Young Woman Interrupted at Her Music later on. Now this is the fourth Vermeer to arrive in America, and they all arrive fairly close to each other between the late 19th century and the early 20th century. The woman with a water picture now at the Metropolitan Museum, which as we will see later on is directly connected to Girl Interrupted at Her Music in a number of ways, is the very first Vermeer, as we know, that arrives at the United States, and it is acquired by Henry Marquand in 1887 and eventually left to the Metropolitan. The second one is also a Metropolitan picture, which instead was bought by Collins Huntington in the late 1880s, so more or less around the same time as the woman with a water picture, slightly later, a year or two later. And this also ends up at the Metropolitan. The third is the concert that is acquired by Isabella Stuart Gardner in 1892, and of course this is a Vermeer that is now missing, famously stolen from Isabella Stuart Gardner and still unrecovered. Frick follows after these, so he's following in the footsteps of Marquand, of Huntington, of Stuart Gardner, and he is clearly looking at these collectors in terms of what they're buying. Frick is very interested in Rembrandt, but his love for Vermeer really comes out of this tradition of American wealthy collectors acquiring works by the artist. And as I say, he follows up with two more Vermeers. Arguably the most beautiful of the three, I would say, is Officer and Laughing Girl, a painting from the late 1650s, which he acquires in 1911 for $225,000 from the widow of Samuel Joseph in London. Again, most of the works Frick is buying, even the Dutch ones, tend to come from English collections at that time. And the final one he buys, which is actually the very last painting Frick ever buys just before his death in 1919, is Mistress and Maid, which is a later picture by Vermeer from the late 1660s, which he acquires for $300,000 from the collection of James Simon in Berlin. So this he actually acquires from Germany. So the Girl Interrupted is part of this group of three, but part of a much larger group of many, many Vermeers that eventually reach the United States and went to enrich museums like the Frick, the Stuart Gardner, but more importantly, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Washington, which have the largest holdings of Vermeer in America. I would guess that about a third of Vermeer's work, if not slightly more, is now in the United States. So back to our painting. What is going on in this picture? And it is worth looking at it closely because there are so many question marks about what is happening in this painting. Is the Girl Interrupted? I mean, clearly there is some interruption that is shown. We're in a very spare room, as often in Vermeer paintings. The window on the left is the main source of light. There is a painting on the wall behind the figures, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. Next to the window, that wooden object is a birdcage, and we'll talk more about that too. There is a man and there is a woman. They are sharing a piece of paper, which as far as we can tell is blank. Is it a letter? Is it a musical sheet? We're not entirely sure. And then there is this extraordinary still life on the central table surrounded by these chairs. The woman is looking out at us. She's dressed in a red, probably velvet, fabric and with a veil over her head. But the way she engages with the viewers, with us, is very direct. And it's really part of the charm of this picture is this. The central part has a still life, which is composed of a musical instrument, probably a very early form of a guitar, effectively, a glass of red wine, a music sheet. And in this case, you can clearly see that it is a music sheet. What is this music? It hasn't been identified precisely, but there is correspondence in our files about it. And according to the research that was most recently done in the 1980s by Katherine McIver, this is not instrumental music, the way it's written and the way it begins with a large capital, but it should actually be vocal music. So it sounds like this is not music to be played on the instrument, but it's rather music that can be sung. And it sounds like the girl is either in the middle of a lesson or has stopped singing or in any case has a music singing book in front of her. Then there is the central vase, the blue and white porcelain vase, decorated with probably silver metal top. And this again, it's usually described as Delftware, but there has been suggestions that it may be an actual Chinese object. It's very difficult to work out what it is. The design is applicable to both Chinese import porcelain that did reach Delft in the 17th century, but also imitations done in Delft, in Delftware. So it's impossible for us at this stage to determine where that object is from. The chair that you see with the two lion heads is typical in Vermeer paintings, appears over and over again. I'm sure this was an object that he owned and he had in his house of a Spanish design. And of course, for those of you who have seen the exhibition in Dresden, there is an example of one of these chairs in the exhibition next to the Dresden picture. The birdcage in the background is a rather interesting object, because one of the questions that I will put forward in a minute is, is this part of Vermeer's concept for the painting or is it again a later edition? And that is something that we are working on at the moment. The painting relates very closely to two other Vermeers from the late 1650s. These are the paintings that are now in Braunschweig, the one on the left, and in Berlin on the right. The one on the left is in the show and the show provides a pretty extraordinary opportunity to be able to see them together, the Braunschweig picture and the Frick one. Very similar in terms of the subject matters, but very different in terms of the sizes. So the girl with a wine glass on the left is a much larger picture than the Frick picture. These are all, as I say, generally dated to the early 1650s, but we can see that all three share a number of things in common. I mean, of course, the floor of the two German pictures, Berlin and Braunschweig, are exactly the same. The room seems to be almost exactly the same room with very similar, if not identical, windows. You always have a man and a woman. In one case there is an extra man in the Braunschweig picture. Each one has a painting in the background, a portrait in Braunschweig, a landscape in Berlin, Cupid in the Frick picture. You have wine or drinks of some kind in all of them and you have an interaction between man and woman. In two of the cases the woman is looking out to us. What has also been noted, and it becomes I think fairly apparent in the show in Dresden very clearly, is that the man in the Frick picture and the man in the Braunschweig picture are the same man, probably the same model. That's probably not the case for the women, but for me I must have used the same male model for the two pictures. Now what is in the background of the Frick picture is obviously key to the exhibition in Dresden and to the great discovery or rediscovery of the Cupid in the background of the girl leaving a letter. And what is in the background of the Frick picture is the same exact painting. You don't see it as well. It's smaller and it is damaged and we'll talk about that also in a second. But you see from this photograph, this close-up photograph, and from the infrared image on the right, that this is a black framed painting of a standing Cupid holding something in his left hand upright, probably based on other images of this work used by Vermeer, a playing card. And the catalogue in the Dresden exhibition, the catalogue of the show, has a beautiful essay by Gregor Weber about the presence of the Cupid with a lot of interesting information about this. And as far as we know, four paintings by Vermeer have this Cupid in the background. The one in Dresden now, the one at the Frick, the one at the Metropolitan Museum of the so-called Maid or Young Girl Asleep, and the National Gallery Lady at Virginal. And this is a photo of the Dresden show showing the room dedicated to the Cupid with, you see at the end, the London picture and the Frick picture together, which is the first time that they can be seen next to each other. And we can compare the appearance of the Cupid in the two of them. Here you see a close-up where, of course, the Cupid is much clearer in the London picture, but also this is a painting that dates from probably the 1660s, a little later, and the whole effect of the light on that wall is very different from the effect of the light in the Frick painting. Here is again a detail, an overall and a detail of the London picture, where you clearly see the Cupid with a bow and arrow and the card in his left hand. Now, back to our painting. There are obviously questions about its condition, and there are questions about its meaning and its dating. And they're all somewhat related. The painting is usually dated to the 1650s because of the iconographic similarity with the Braunschweig and the Berlin pictures. But the dating of the Meyer paintings is often rather complicated, and so how to place this painting precisely remains to be altogether established, I feel. It's generally been dated anywhere between the second half of the 1650s and the early 1660s. The most recent dating by Walter Liedtke at the Metropolitan Museum has been 1658-59, but again mostly based on the comparison with the German pictures. This painting by Vermeer, out of the three we own at the Frick, and in general out of the corpus of Vermeer paintings, is one that has suffered a huge amount. And the condition of this picture remains very problematic in terms of our understanding of the picture. It is a painting that is abraded throughout. It has areas of the paint surface that are incredibly well preserved, like, for example, the still life in the middle at the heart of the painting. But other areas, the draperies around the figures, the bluish-gray cloak of the man and the skirt of the woman, the red of the woman, are incredibly abraded. The landscape is all incredibly abraded, and this photo shows that very clearly. And the cupid in the background is also somewhat damaged. One of the interesting things is that this painting shares a similar history as the Dresden one, because at some point—we do not know when—the cupid was covered up. And when the painting is described in 1810 for the first time, and then later on by a number of scholars, it is described as having on the wall a violin with a bow and part of a chimney piece. And there is no mention of the cupid. Clearly the cupid was not visible, was not there. And many scholars at the time, in the late 19th century, mentioned that the violin, the chimney piece, and the birdcage all appear to be later editions and not by Vermeer. The painting was cleaned between 1900 and 1901. And this, again, we don't have firm evidence of this. Generally speaking, in fact, the catalogue of the exhibition and a number of other sites mention that the painting was cleaned around 1907, and that appears in some of the literature. But it was before that. It was between the summer of 1900 and the summer of 1901. It was cleaned by Alois Hauser, the conservator in Berlin. We don't have any records of what happened in that cleaning. But what is clear is that the violin, the chimney piece were removed, the cupid was uncovered, but for some reason the birdcage was kept. So it is a complicated restoration, of course, for those of you who have seen the amazing Dresden picture, beautifully, beautifully cleaned by Christoph Schutzel and by the team in Dresden. There was an international committee working on that and being very careful about what happened with the painting, and they did an incredible job. In our case, in 1900, 1901, before the picture came to the Frick, the treatment was a rather problematic one, in a way, because things were removed, things were left, and it is unclear why that was done. So we inherited that situation. There are no images, as far as I know or anyone has been able to find, of this picture pre-1900, pre the removal. When it entered the collection of Henry Clay Frick, it already looked like this. The last time it was cleaned was in 1949, and it was cleaned, so it entered the collection in 1901. It was not touched until 1949, and that is when William Suhr, the conservator at the Metropolitan Museum, did the last proper cleaning of the picture. And these are photos that are not usually seen around, that I'm sharing with you, which show you very clearly the status of this painting. So this is a paint, is a photograph, color photograph, from 1949 of the painting during cleaning. So the browner, darker areas that you see in the background, and on part of the figures and the music sheet, are the way it looked beforehand, with dirt and the scullet varnish. And here you see it in the process of being cleaned. Here you see it, again, the color balance is not great. This is, as a reminder, a photo from 1949. But here you see it in what is known as its stripped state. So this is, with all the later restorations removed. And what you see is that there are a number of losses, but also the biggest problem is that the painting is abraded. So the last layer of painting that Vermeer would have applied to a work like this has been removed, probably because of very bad cleanings in the past, I assume in the 18th and 19th century, we don't really know. This is an infrared, which was done in 1949 of the picture. And again, it shows the condition of it. But it clearly shows also how the birdcage is painted in a very different way from everything else. And the question of the birdcage and its addition and when it was added, and why it wasn't removed in 1901, remains. William Suhr in 1949, being uncertain about the condition of this picture in terms of the birdcage, and when that was added and who it was added by, decided very judiciously not to remove it. And so the birdcage remained. And here you see a before and after shot of 1949 of that restoration. And even though of course, the photos are both somewhat discolored, the painting has remained the same since 1949. With two slight exceptions, it was re-varnished in 1983, the very sort of standard practice, and the surface was clean very lightly above the varnish in 2005. But generally speaking, the picture has remained in this status ever since. This means that this is a chance for us to really rethink what this picture should look like, and also rethink technical analysis and really focus on this issue of what was added, what is the status of this painting. So its presence in the Dresden show, next door almost to the girl reading a letter from Dresden, after having seen the really successful restoration of that picture, which of course is a painting that is in almost pristine conditions, except for the additions and the scarlet varnishes and dirt, has inspired us to do more research. And once the painting comes out of the Dresden show, we will, in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, analyze this very thoroughly. And with new techniques that were of course not available in 1949, we will try and establish the status of the birdcage, the status of the picture in general. There are a number of very problematic areas. You can see that the lower right hand of the picture has this very sharp passage between what may or may not be the floor of the room and the the wall of the room, which is a lot more visible now than it was pre-cleaning in 1949. And then of course there is also the question of what is happening to the wall behind the window and beneath the window on the left, which, if you look at it, almost looks like an abstract series of patches of different colors, yellow, blue, and gray. And of course those are areas of damage that we need to know more about before we can decide if anything can be done at all. This doesn't mean that the painting will be necessarily restored or worked on, but it means that we want to start talking to our colleagues in Amsterdam, in Dresden, at the Metropolitan Museum, and a number of other places to see what could or should be done to this painting, if anything at all can be done. The last note on technical matters is that this painting was part of a project called Counting Vermeer Project, which was spearheaded by C. Richard Johnson, Jr. at Cornell University and Don H. Johnson at Rice University. And this is a thread count of Vermeer canvases, trying to see if any paintings came from the same batch of canvas. And Our Girl Interrupted at Her Music is a perfect match with The Woman with a Picture at the Metropolitan Museum. And here below, you see how the threads of the canvas continue seamlessly from one to the other. Of course, the Vermeer has to be rotated slightly for this to happen, the canvas would use in a different direction. What does this mean? And again, the jury's out on this. It doesn't mean that these two paintings are much closer in date to one another than we thought. Clearly, Vermeer is using the same piece of canvas to paint them. It doesn't mean that they were painted at the same time, you know, he could have rolled the piece of canvas and used it years later or years before, we don't know. But it's another interesting piece of knowledge that has reached us in the last decade about technical analysis and study of Vermeer. So what is the relationship between these two paintings? And is it a closer relationship than we had imagined previously? Probably that is the case. The painting is now in its new temporary home at Frick Madison. As I mentioned, the Frick Collection is closed for the time being for renovation. And so we moved in the Brutalist building designed by Marcel Breuer. And of course, the painting is currently in Dresden. But when it comes back in January, it will be back in a room entirely devoted to Vermeer, with three Vermeers together in a single space. And so I hope that many of you will be able to visit once it reopens, the show in Dresden, and we'll be able to visit the three Vermeers together in New York in the next few years. And I invite you all to come and I hope you will all be able to see the painting and think about some of these questions. As I mentioned before, I don't have the answers for many of the questions, but I think this painting is prompting a lot of research that needs to be carried out and that hopefully will give us better answers to understand the painting in a better way.