'To the Happier Carpenter'. Rembrandt's War-Heroine Margaretha de Geer, the London Public and the right to Pictures: The Eighth Horst Gerson Lecture, held on November 9, 1995

The Eighth Gerson Lecture, held in memory of Horst Gerson (1907-1978) in the Aula of the University of Groningen on November 9, 1995.

In this lecture, I should like to offer another National Gallery footnote. It is one of which I believe Gerson himself would have approved: the exhibition in the National Gallery in 1942 of Rembrandt's bust-length portrait of Margaretha de Geer which made her for a few months the most famous Dutch picture in England. Occuring in the very year the Ausbreitung was published, it offers, I think, one of the most fascinating and unexpected examples of the Nachwirkung in a foreign country of a seventeenth-century Dutch painting.