I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned this on my blog before, but I collect postcards. Especially, postcards of my favorite artworks.

I started this beautiful, cheap, but slightly-obsessive collection (everybody's gotta have a hobby, right?) when I was studying abroad in London in the spring of 2004. I took an Art History class where we visited the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the Wallace Collection, and more. But at the start of the semester our instructor told us that we would be quizzed on the paintings at the end of the year and it might be wise to purchase postcards so we'd have the paintings/pieces of art, the artists, and the years they were created on hand.

Well, nearly a decade later, and I have well over 100 of these postcards. There's the Venus de Milo from the Louvre, Munch's The Scream in Oslo, the statue of David in Florence, Byzantine religious paintings on the walls of stone churches in Turkey, postcards from the local Clark and Norman Rockwell museums.

My rule, however, is that I can only buy postcards of work I've actually seen. I think I've made on exception to this rule and I'm about to be able to correct it. While in The Netherlands, I purchased a card for the Girl with a Pearl Earring painting. There was much art and other attractions to be seen in The Netherlands - Rembrandts at the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum (which is not always pronounced the way you'd think) , the Anne Frank house, to name a few. But I never made it to see Johannes Vermeer's painting in The Hague, mainly because I only had time to travel to Amsterdam (something else I hope to correct in the near future).

But the painting is now traveling - for the first time in a long time - to the Frick Collection in New York City. It'll be on display from Oct. 22 to Jan. 19. It looks like admission will be about $20.

And I'm thinking this is a great excuse for a visit to NYC, and much cheaper than flying. I'll be sure to send you a postcard.