Over three postwar decades, he assembled a "deeply personal"[1] and much revered collection centered on thirty-three works by Paul Cézanne and more than forty by Vincent van Gogh, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and a dozen other European modernists.

[4] Pearlman quickly made connections in the New York art world and traded his decorative collection for carefully selected examples of modern works by impressionist, post-impressionist and expressionist European artists.

"[6] In 1950, Pearlman learned from a dealer that Van Gogh’s Tarascon Diligence was available from the heirs of the artist Milo Beretta.

Over the following two decades, he acquired more than thirty works by Cézanne and assemble a distinguished collection of watercolors by the artist.

[9] In addition to Modigliani, he added works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Degas, Renoir and Gauguin as well as several significant oil paintings by Cézanne, including the only known vertical-format[10] of the artist’s favorite subject, Mont Sainte-Victoire.

His last two purchases were Cézanne watercolors: a late masterpiece (Still Life with Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit) and Rocks at Bibémus.

[11] Beginning in the 1950s, Henry and Rose Pearlman began lending individual works to major museums, initially for retrospectives of Soutine[12] and Modigliani.

[13] Pearlman also lent financial and other support to artists, including Kokoschka and Jacques Lipchitz, whose studio was destroyed by fire in 1952.

[15] The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation was established in 1955 as a not-for-profit organization and is the current owner of the collection.

The first exhibition of the collection took place in 1958, when twenty-seven selected works were lent anonymously to the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Henry Pearlman spent much of the last year of his life organizing an exhibition of the collection at the Brooklyn Museum,[27] which toured after his death to Princeton,[28] Utica (NY),[29] Williamstown (MA)[30] and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.

[31] The collection returned to the Princeton University Art Museum in 1976, when Rose Pearlman, as head of the foundation, initiated a series of longer-term loans that continue to this day.

In 2014, the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation and the Princeton University Art Museum initiated a tour of the collection, including its first exhibitions outside the United States.

With the aim of expanding the audience for these works and artists, the tour (Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection) opened at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, in March 2014, to critical acclaim.

The collection then returned to North America with three exhibitions: The High Museum in Atlanta, the Vancouver Art Gallery and at Princeton for the fall semester of 2015.

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Henry and Rose Pearlman papers, 1893-1995 (bulk 1950-1980).

ISBN 9780943012209 A Loan Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolors and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Pearlman for the Benefit of Greenwich House.

Rachael Z. DeLue et al., Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection (New Haven and Princeton, 2014).

Impressionism, Post-impressionism, Expressionism: The Mr. & Mrs. Henry Pearlman Collection of Works by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Degas, Toulouse Lautrec, Manet, Modigliani, Soutine, and Others.