Art treasures from the Vienna collections

In the years following the Second World War, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna organised one of the most ambitious touring exhibitions of the twentieth century. Its collections, including paintings, Renaissance bronzes, goldsmiths' work, tapestries, and antiquities accumulated over centuries by the House of Habsburg, had been hidden in salt mines in Upper Austria during the war to protect them from Allied bombing. After their recovery in 1945, the Austrian government arranged for a substantial selection to travel internationally, in part as an expression of gratitude to the countries that had helped safeguard and retrieve the works. The tour began in Zurich in October 1946 under the title 'Meisterwerke aus Oesterreich', then moved to Brussels, Amsterdam, and Paris before reaching London.The London showing opened at the Tate Gallery on 12 May 1949 and remained on view until 3 September 1949. The exhibition brought together roughly 200 paintings from the Vienna Picture Gallery alongside decorative arts, arms and armour, and illuminated manuscripts, offering British audiences a concentrated survey of the imperial collection. Among the Old Masters represented were Titian, Rubens, van Dyck, Velazquez, Rembrandt, and Holbein. After closing in London the exhibition continued to the United States, where it appeared in Washington, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago through 1951 before the works returned to Vienna in 1953.Vermeer's 'The Art of Painting' was included in the London presentation as catalogue number 191. The picture, which Vermeer had kept in his own possession until his death and which had passed through a long sequence of owners before entering the imperial collection, had only formally been transferred to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in November 1945. Its appearance in London was among its first public showings since before the war and one of the earliest opportunities for international audiences to see it outside Austria.