Description of the first 'Old Master' exhibitions in Rome and Florence in the seventeenth century and of efforts to organize exhibitions of contemporary art, as alternative to the official ones held by the Salon, in eigteenth-century France. Survey of the role of the British Institution in London and the series of remarkable loan exhibitions of Old Master paintings there. The emergence of such nationalist exhibitions as the Rembrandt exhibition in Amsterdam in 1898, the first modern blockbuster show. The international loan exhibition was a vehicle of foreign and cultural policy after the First World War, in spite of the initial reluctance of major museums to send pictures on potentially damaging journeys.