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

Saint Louis was one of roughly fourteen American cities to host the travelling exhibition of some 200 paintings rescued from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin and held under US Army custody. The show ran for eighteen days, from 31 January to 17 February 1949, slotted between the Los Angeles and Philadelphia legs of the tour. Vermeer's Woman with a Pearl Necklaceappeared as catalogue number 138, illustrated and listed under the title “Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace.”

The Saint Louis Art Museum stands in Forest Park, occupying the Palace of Fine Arts built for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The institution traces its roots to the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts founded in 1879 and has been free to the public since the establishment of a local cultural tax district. Its encyclopedic collection numbers more than 34,000 objects spanning antiquity to the present.