In November 1945, the U.S. military government in Germany ordered the transfer of two hundred European paintings from the Berlin State Museums to Washington, D.C., for safekeeping.

Captain Walter I. Farmer of Cincinnati, a member of the “Monuments Men,” led the unit’s protest of this controversial decision. Nevertheless, 202 paintings were shipped to Washington and stored in the National Gallery of Art. In 1948, the paintings were exhibited in Washington and then sent on a national tour, before being returned to Germany.

The “Berlin 202,” as the paintings were known, quickly became a sensation in America. Spanning six centuries of European painting, the exhibition featured fifteen paintings by Rembrandt, six by Rubens, five each by Botticelli and Titian, and dozens of others by well-known artists, a selection of which are reproduced in this gallery.

The majority of the works were selected from the collections of Berlin’s Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum. The “202” included a large number of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian paintings and seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. The Flemish and German schools were each represented by about thirty works, while far fewer French paintings and only one Spanish work were included. The variety among the “202,” from altarpieces and devotional paintings to portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes, and their incredible quality, was unlike anything seen before in America.

The exhibition begins at the far end of Gallery 234.