First & Last Look

It was the biggest & best collection of borrowed art since the loot Napoleon had brought home to the Louvre from his conquering sweep of Europe. And it was even better guarded. In Washington's National Gallery, blue-coated guards in reinforced numbers paced the corridors. Military policemen stood in every room. But the 202 paintings they were guarding (estimated value: $80,000,000) were not loot, though they too had been brought back by conquerors (TIME, Feb. 11, 1946). All but two--a Daumier and a Manet--had once hung on the walls of Berlin's Kaiser Friedrich Museum.

Last week, the conquerors were making the most of this loot-on-loan. One day the attendance at the National Gallery was 11,895. Lecturers took whole platoons of sightseers through, speaking in sibilant whispers, and on the rim of every cluster gallerygoers jostled to see & hear. But no one could take in everything--the 15 Rembrandts, six Rubens, five Botticellis, the Bruegels, Vermeers, three Raphaels, five Jan van Eycks, five Titians, three Watteaus, the Holbeins, Diirers, Hals and the Velasquez.

An American lieutenant colonel had stumbled on the treasure, 2,000 feet underground in a German salt mine. After being on show for a month in Washington, the 202 paintings will be returned to Germany--but not to Berlin, for fear that the Russians might grab them, as they grabbed the treasures of the Zwinger in Dresden. Instead, they will probably go to Wiesbaden and Munich, in the U.S. zone.

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