An Exhibition of Paintings by Living Masters of the Past

"An Exhibition of Paintings by Living Masters of the Past" was a touring Old Master loan exhibition that passed through two venues in 1943: the North Carolina State Art Society Gallery in Raleigh and the Baltimore Museum of Art (which ran its presentation 10 October to 21 November). Exact dates for the Raleigh presentation are unrecorded. The North Carolina State Art Society, founded in 1924 and housed since 1939 in the former Supreme Court Building in Raleigh, was at this period the state's principal vehicle for bringing significant paintings before a public that had no permanent collection of its own; the State Art Society Gallery would not become the North Carolina Museum of Art until 1947.

Vermeer's A Lady Writing (c. 1665) was among the paintings shown. During the early 1940s the picture was owned by Lady Eunice Oakes, widow of the Canadian mining magnate Sir Harry Oakes, whose estate was in Nassau, Bahamas. Despite that distant residence, the canvas circulated frequently on the American exhibition circuit between 1940 and 1946, appearing in New York in 1940, 1941, 1942, and 1946, in Chicago in 1942, and in both Raleigh and Baltimore in 1943. The wartime loan circuit served a double purpose: it sustained public engagement with major works at a time when transatlantic travel was suspended, and it brought Old Masters to regional audiences who would otherwise have had no opportunity to see them.