For Fervent Fans of the Dutch Masters, "It's a Dream Come True" Shin-Ichi Fukuoka, center, an avid fan of Vermeer, is flanked by works by that Dutch master at the Frick Collection's popular show "Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting From the Mauritshuis." Shin-Ichi Fukuoka, a molecular biologist from Tokyo, really - really - loves Johannes Vermeer. He has traveled around the world to visit 34 of the 36 paintings known or believed to be Vermeers. And last year he accepted a visiting professorship in New York in large part to witness an extraordinarily rare occurrence: the Frick Collection's own three splendid Vermeers and three Rembrandts joined briefly by 15 works on loan from one of the world's best Dutch collections, the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague, including one of the most famous faces in Western art, "Girl With a Pearl Earring." A halo surrounds Golden Age paintings from the Northern Netherlands more than almost any period of art. The Dutch masters of the 17th century - among them Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hals, Fabritius - draw loyal and obsessive museumgoers who rival those Wagner fanatics who travel the world to hear every "Ring" cycle. Like Mr. Fukuoka, they arrange their vacations, their business trips, their reading, their friends and a good portion of the rest of their lives around seeing the quiet masterpieces created during one of the high points in painting's history. The Frick show "Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals" - made possible because the Mauritshuis is loaning out its treasures during an extensive renovation - broke a single-day attendance record during the exhibition's first weekend. But a convergence is also driving traffic to the exhibition: With four Vermeers at the Frick through Jan. 19, five in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, four at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and one attributed, in whole or in part, to Vermeer now on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Eastern Seaboard temporarily features 38.8 percent of all known Vermeers, accessible by Amtrak. A reported 37th painting has long been disputed. "It's a dream come true," Dr. Fukuoka said during a recent visit to the Frick, explaining that, as a young man, he fell in love with Vermeer's work while researching the history of the microscope in Delft, the artist's hometown. "He doesn't try to interpret the world," he said. There's no egocentrism. He just tried to describe the world as it was. I think of him as a photographer in an age before photography. Dr. Fukuoka was so moved that he organized his own Vermeer exhibition in Tokyo last year, displaying high-resolution framed photographs of the paintings in a gallery that he rented, drawing 150,000 visitors over 10 months despite having not a single actual painting. A show of Mauritshuis works on view at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum last year, including "Girl With a Pearl Earring," drew more than a million visitors over just two and a half months. As devoted as Dr. Fukuoka is, there are fans who have done him one, or two, better. Tracy Chevalier, who wrote "Girl With a Pearl Earring," the 1999 historical novel that inspired a movie and transformed the painting into a bona fide cultural phenomenon, has seen 36 Vermeers in her travels around the world and recently came to New York for the Frick show. "The opportunity to see four Vermeers in one building was too good a chance to pass up," she said in a telephone interview from London, where she lives and often goes to see the four Vermeers in and around her own city. "I think one of the reasons people are drawn to Dutch painting now is because it's not religious, by and large," Ms. Chevalier said. It's people sitting around playing cards or a woman mopping the floor, or it's a fish market or an interior of a home. I think we like to see that window onto a middle-class world that is not all that different from our own. There's something like us in there. The line forms early, in rain or bitter cold, for the Frick show, whose timed tickets cost $20 and include the audio guide. Admission this Friday night and other selected Friday nights is free. In addition to general Dutch masters mania, the show is also benefiting from the popularity of "The Goldfinch," the new novel by Donna Tartt; the book is inspired by a small, powerful painting of the same title, on loan from the Mauritshuis, by Carel Fabritius, a student of Rembrandt who died young. Heidi Rosenau, a spokeswoman for the Frick, said that the museum has felt the newfound popularity of the Fabritius painting: For every 1,000 postcards it sold of "Girl With a Pearl Earring," about 800 of "The Goldfinch" have been sold since the show opened on Oct. 22. William Thurston, a gastroenterologist from San Jose, Calif., caught a plane to New York just to see the Frick show and attend a lecture on the visiting Dutch works by the Mauritshuis's senior curator, Quentin Buvelot. "I wouldn't miss something like this," Dr. Thurston said. The history of art and the history of Western culture are what I'm interested in, and they're so woven together, it's just wonderful for me to come see things like this. His passion is not limited to the Dutch; he has flown to New York on three consecutive weekends for Frick lectures about the Italian Renaissance master Giovanni Bellini and traveled to Philadelphia, St. Louis and Washington specifically to see shows covering much of the sweep of Western art. "I organize all my travel time around things like this," he said. Jonathan Janson, an aficionado of Dutch painting who is behind the most popular and perhaps most obsessive amateur Vermeer website, essentialvermeer.com, said that in his experience, a love of Dutch painting tends to peak with Vermeer and Rembrandt. "For example, there really aren't a lot of Frans Hals people out there, besides scholars and dealers, that I've found," said Mr. Janson, an American painter who lives in Rome and also maintains a Rembrandt site. After the big two, there's sort of a ledge. But that said, Dutch painting fans of all sorts seek him out as something of a high command of amateur ardor, which makes sense given that he says he sometimes spends five hours a day working on his Vermeer site. "It might be hard to believe, but there are people traipsing around the world all the time in search of these kinds of paintings," he said. And I guess I hear from them because they want to find somebody else who knows why they're doing this kind of crazy thing. With longing, he added, "I wish I could be in New York right now."