Paintings from the Berlin Museums Exhibited in Co-operation with The Department of The Army

From 19 June to 7 July 1948, the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted a portion of the celebrated travelling exhibition of paintings rescued from Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich Museum and held in U.S. Army custody since December 1945. The tour opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (March–April 1948) and then the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before moving on to a succession of American cities; Philadelphia was among the earliest stops outside those two anchor institutions. Two Vermeer paintings were on view: Woman with a Pearl Necklace as catalogue number 138 and The Glass of Wine as catalogue number 139, both lent from the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin.

The Philadelphia stop is distinct from a separate appearance of the same travelling exhibition in early 1949, listed in some sources under “Philadelphia” but held at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh (27 February to 14 March 1949), where the two Vermeers appeared under the same catalogue numbers. Together the tour attracted roughly 2.5 million visitors across 14 American cities before the paintings were returned to Germany in 1949.