Arthur Wheelock’s Dutch Treat

That exhibit, Johannes Vermeer, brought together 22 of the enigmatic Dutch genius’ 35 known paintings. Three centuries had passed since the last time so many Vermeers could be seen in one place.

“That was something nobody ever thought would be possible,Ó says Wheelock, curator of northern Baroque paintings. “You couldn’t get the loans.Ó

And yet, after eight years of negotiations with museums and private collectors throughout the United States and Europe, he was about to make it happen. It would be the apex of a career that began when he’d written his dissertation on Vermeer more than 20 years earlier.

The show opened on Nov. 12. Two days later, it closed with the rest of the gallery, a victim of the federal budget impasse between President Bill Clinton and Congress that shut down the government for six days that month and 10 more the next.

The Vermeer exhibit couldn’t be extended in Washington: It was due to open at the Mauritshuis — the Dutch Royal picture gallery — on March 1. Acting quickly, the gallery secured private money to reopen Johannes Vermeer, but not the rest of the museum, during the second shutdown. In January, a record-breaking snowfall buried Washington, at a cost of three more exhibition days.

“People started lining up at four in the morning, in the snow,Ó Wheelock remembers. “By the end of the show, the first person in line was there at 9 o’clock at night. The line went all the way around the West Building. Then you got into the gallery, and it was quiet a church. One of the reasons the line was so long was that nobody wanted to leave. They just wanted to be there.Ó

So it is with Wheeler, 66, who has spent 35 years at the National Gallery. He came on a fellowship, and now ranks as one of the star curators among the 30 at the nation’s most visited art museum.

“He’s one of the world’s experts on a major field of art history, but he knows the broader world of art history very well, too,Ó says Franklin Kelly, the National Gallery’s senior curator of British and American painting, who has known Wheelock for 29 years. “I can remember discussing with him American pictures I was interested in acquiring. … He always has an opinion.Ó

The museum’s design chief, Mark Leithauser, calls him “the gallery jock,Ó which is no mere metaphor: Wheelock has completed 10 triathlons, and he’s competing in a 1.7-mile charity swim in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay next Saturday.

“Arthur is a shark moving through the water,Ó says Leithauser, who met him in the early 1970s. “One damn show after another.Ó

Indeed, Wheelock has staged more than 30 exhibitions of Dutch art at the gallery. He’s made a reputation for reintroducing the public to worthy 17th-century artists who are not household names like Rembrandt or Vermeer — Jan Lievens, Abraham de Verwer, Adriaen Coorte — while contributing new insights into the era’s big guns.

In other words, things have gone more or less to plan.

Wheelock came to the NAtional Gallery as a 30-year-old scholar eager to make his mark on an institution then barely older than he was. Growing up in Uxbridge, Mass., he painted, like his mother. Together they frequented the Worcester Art Museum. At Williams College, he petitioned out of freshman English to take art history, “part of the core curriculum at Williams,Ó he says. “There was nothing effete about it.Ó

In his senior year, he took a class with visiting Harvard professor Jakob Rosenberg. Rosenberg was semiretired, but Seymour Slive, who was Rosenberg’s collaborator on the exhibit Dutch Painting, 1600-1800, still taught at Harvard, so that’s where Wheelock went to do graduate work. While there he won a David E. Finley Fellowship: two years of study abroad followed by a year in Washington. Wheelock moved his young family to the Netherlands (where youngest of his three children was born) to write his dissertation, finally arriving at the gallery in 1973.

Rich in masterworks but penniless in supporting material, it was virgin territory for an inquisitive guy like him.

“Nobody had done any research,Ó Wheelock recalls. “There were no files. Basically [the gallery] was a collection of collections,Ó reflecting the makeup of the Paul Mellon and Joseph Widener bequests that comprised its initial inventory. “There was a period taste from 1893 to the end of the 1930s.Ó Artists not deemed important then, or simply not to Mellon’s or Widener’s liking, were absent.

Wheelock befriended A.B. deVries, a Holocaust survivor and former Mauritshuis director who had come to advise the gallery on policy and acquisitions. Like Wheelock, he’d written his dissertation on Vermeer. And like Wheelock, he found himself with a lot of time on his hands.

The two Vermeer scholars decided to fill their days with hands-on scholarship. They removed Vermeers from their frames and examined them under microscopes in the gallery’s laboratory. They visited Vermeers in other museums. Next they embarked on an equally rigorous inquiry into the collection’s Rembrandts, bringing in ultraviolet lights to reveal where the paintings had been cut or painted over.

His fellowship ended in April 1974, and Wheelock took a teaching post at the University of Maryland. The following year, he was appointed curator of Dutch and Flemish painting at the gallery, where he’s remained ever since, while continuing to teach at Maryland.

Wheelock and deVries played high-profile roles in a controversy over Rembrandt that began in 1969, the 300th anniversary of the artist’s death. After other scholars, notably Horst Gerson, claimed that some of the paintings long believed to be painted by him were actually the work of others, the two undertook an investigation of the gallery’s 20 Rembrandts. They defended the authenticity of all of them, most notably “The MillÓ (1648/49). Once “rejected almost universally,Ó Wheelock says, his view of its authenticity has now largely prevailed.

He revisited the attribution issue in last year’s “Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered,Ó which included six works once believed to be Rembrandts. Wheelock rejects the “yea or nayÓ approach, pointing out Rembrandt often collaborated with apprentices. He favors the credit “Rembrandt and workshopÓ in these instances.

After four decades’ scholarship, he’s still an art lover first, ultimately more interested in a painting’s emotional effect than he is with the signature it bears.

“What’s still exciting is revisiting these works and seeing how you keep responding to them in new ways,Ó he says, reflecting on the collection that’s grown up along with him. “A painting may be the same entity it was a year ago, but you’ve changed. Your emotional response changes.Ó

Reflecting for a moment, he continues. “Add those up, and it’s a richer relationship you have with that work of art.Ó