The Frick Collection in New York recently closed its Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis exhibition of fifteen seventeenth-century Dutch paintings on loan from the Hague museum, which is currently closed for remodeling. The show (which has already been to San Francisco, Atlanta, and Tokyo, and opens next in Bologna) was a blockbuster, with visitors regularly forming lines wrapping around the building.

I saw the exhibition near the end of its run, and can attest that the attention was well-deserved, and not just because this was likely the only chance many in the New York area would ever have to see these works. Among the paintings on view, more than one were drop-dead stunners. Much attention was naturally paid to Vermeer’s "Girl with a Pearl Earring", which is incredibly more arresting in person than it is in reproduction.