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

The M.H. de Young Memorial Museum was the eighth and final 1948 stop on the US Army’s tour of approximately 200 paintings rescued from the Merkers potassium mine. Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace was shown as catalogue number 138, the same number it carried at every venue on the tour. San Francisco followed Portland (November 25 to December 3) to close out the year, with the 1949 leg continuing in Los Angeles, Saint Louis, Pittsburgh, and Toledo before the works returned to Germany in spring 1949.

The de Young, situated in Golden Gate Park, was at the time San Francisco’s principal encyclopedic art museum and the natural West Coast anchor for the tour. The exhibition ran for just nineteen days, drawing crowds eager to see masterworks from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum that had been absent from public view since the outbreak of the war.