Two California museums will offer visitors a rare view of exquisite masterworks by 17th-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, on loan from Dutch museums, this winter.

Vermeer's 1665 Girl With a Pearl Earring, one of the world's most recognizable paintings — on loan from the Mauritshuis and in recent years the inspiration for a novel and film of the same name — has debuted at San Francisco's de Young Museum.

The exhibition "Girl With a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis" is on view at the de Young from Jan. 26 to June 2, and includes 34 other masterpieces from the Golden Age of Dutch painting, including works by Rembrandt van Rijn and Carel Fabritius. The Mauritshuis is undergoing a renovation.

Another of Vermeer’s finest works, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (circa 1663–64), from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, will travel to the West Coast of the U.S. for the first time, to go on view at Los Angeles’s Getty Center from Feb. 16 through March 31.

While the Rijksmuseum is being renovated, the painting has been on a worldwide tour.

“This truly represents an extraordinary opportunity for Southern California," explains Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. "Vermeer’s Woman in Blue is one of his greatest and most famous masterpieces. It has very rarely traveled outside of Amsterdam and this is the painting’s first visit to the West Coast. Vermeer’s paintings of women reading letters and engaged in other private, domestic activities have a unique intimacy and reality to them that can only be fully appreciated in the flesh. His finest works, like the Woman in Blue, have a magical immediacy that has never been rivaled."