Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. is in love.
“This is so Dutch: A third of the painting is water, two-thirds is sky, and in between is about a quarter of an inch of city, stretching out across the horizon,” he says. “It’s a quiet little painting, but very magical. It has this incredible atmosphere to it.”
Wheelock, the National Gallery of Art’s curator of Northern Baroque painting, is drinking in Abraham de Verwer’s “View of Hoorn,” seemingly still as captivated by the 360-year-old painting as he was when he first spotted it in the Netherlands about a year ago. A showstopper in a exhibition not hurting for them (“Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes in the Golden Age”), the painting is the work of a little-known Dutch artist, one Wheelock previously knew of primarily as a draftsman.
“He is a footnote in terms of the art world,” Wheelock says. “But as a painting, this is exceptional. The emotional impact of this image was so striking.”
Indeed, when Wheelock spotted “View of Hoorn” among London art dealer Johnny Van Haeften’s offerings at the European Fine Art Fair in Masstricht, it brought him to his knees.
Or it might have, if Wheelock hadn’t had to get down on all fours already just to see the painting. Van Haeften apparently didn’t think much of its sales potential: Wheelock found it hidden away in a poorly lit backroom.
“It was down by your ankles,” Wheelock remembers.
A member of the fair’s vetting committee, Wheelock was surveying its offerings before the event’s opening the following morning. “I was prowling around, and I saw this painting and said, ‘Oh my gosh, what is this?’” he remembers. “You can see American luminous painting coming out of this … probably to the eyes of an American, it’s more appealing than for a British dealer.”
Of course, once Van Haeften saw how the painting impressed Wheelock — a Harvard Ph.D. who has been with the NGA for more than three decades — he gave the curator “only about five hours” in which to close the deal. Wheelock says this was unusual. “I think he figured out it was highly undervalued,” he says. Wheelock doesn’t have the authority to make this kind of acquisition without approval by his superiors and the NGA’s Board or Trustees.
“I scrambled around trying to find somebody who might buy it and give it to the gallery at some later date,” he recalls.
A private collector came to Wheelock’s rescue, approaching Van Haeften and promising to fund the painting’s purchase if Wheelock couldn’t raise the money within a month. The Derald H. Ruttenberg Memorial Fund ultimately purchased it for the gallery.
Even in the “Pride of Place” show’s run at the Royal Picture Gallery in the Hague before its arrival in Washington, “View of Hoorn” had an immediate effect. “So many people stopped and talked about it,” Wheelock says. “It became kind of the star of the show, in a funny way. Even in the midst of all these other great paintings, it was this extraordinary, luminous image that came out of nowhere.”
If you go
“Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes in the Golden Age” at the National Gallery of Art
Where: National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW
When: Through May
Info: Free; 202-737-4215; nga.gov
