Walter Liedtke , a specialist in Dutch and Flemish paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he worked for 35 years, was killed on February 3, in the fireball the followed a commuter train crash outside New York. He was on his way home from work. He had a passion for the art that was his subject, the artists who created it and the scholarship that can illuminate our understanding of it. See and listen to him demonstrate that in this video (part of the Met series 82nd and Fifth), in which he talks about Rembrandt's painting Aristotle with a bust of Homer.
What follows is a interview with Walter that I wrote which appeared in the 25th anniversary of TEFAF the biggest and best art and antiques fair that takes place every March in Maastricht, the Netherlands. He was a regular visitor. A deservedly confident professional, he was not arrogant. For him, the fair offered the change to learn as well as to a good time and, occasionally, to buy.
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“Things come out of the woodwork.” This is what draws Dr Walter Liedtke, Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to TEFAF every year. Liedtke. who specializes in North European architectural paintings, says his few days at the Fair may be his only chance to see Old Masters that have come from one private collection and will disappear into another. He sees more Old Masters at the Fair than he can expect to come across at an auction, private dealers or other museums in a year. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, has a large collection of 99 Dutch paintings of which about half are hanging at any one time. Now in his late sixties, he continues to be a student of his subject. “At Maastricht I can see maybe 500 different Dutch painters,” he says. “I come back with pages of notes. The experience is great.”
Although Liedtke goes to TEFAF expecting to
learn rather than to buy--“the Met already has a rich collection and the things
we lack are quite expensive--” he explains, he occasionally finds paintings
that would enhance its holdings. He still vividly recalls one that got away in
n 1999. It was a Gerard van Honthorst at the stand of the Milan-based Dutch
dealer Rob Smeets. Liedtke thought the $2 million asking price was extremely
cheap and reserved it but Smeets would hold it only for one week. “Everyone at the museum agreed that it was
the great Caravaggesque painting we lacked,” he recalls. But at that time there
was no one willing to donate the money needed to buy it and the picture went to
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Liedtke himself collects Oriental
art but nevertheless twice in the 25 years he has attended the Fair he has ended
up buying European paintings to take home. Most recently he could not resist a
work by Rotterdam painter Anthony de Lorme at the stand of Raphael Valls.
Along with many museum professionals
who are regular visitors to Maastricht, Liedtke also enjoys the social side of
the Fair. “I have favourite dealers
because of their personalities and practical, hands-on knowledge of the field,”
he says. He admires their ability to place their bets on decisions sometimes
made in hurry. “Otto Naumann will walk into some old lady’s attic, look at a
thing and say ‘Yes, I’ll have it for half a million dollars,’” Liedtke says.
“It could be by a fairly minor artist but, under a ton of dust, a great example
of his work.” He has the
candour and uncommon humility to add that at the
Metropolitan Museum he is able to study a painting for as long as a decade
before coming to a comparable conclusion.
The European decorative arts galleries at the 
