A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in America: 2 (The Frick Collection Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America) - Hardcover

"Thousands of Italian Renaissance paintings began to find their way to America in the nineteenth century, and the majority of these pictures-by artists great or obscure-can now be enjoyed in public art collections. In this single volume, we are given an overview of this remarkable story of the importation of art-indeed, of culture. Notable experts such as David Brown and Inge Reist recuperate this episode of art history, introduce us to the collectors, their motives, and their methods, and depict the early moments of American museums. The complicated competing interests of connoisseurship and business, optimistic attributions, deceit, and mistakes born of a newly developing expertise are all in these pages. Once these collectors-Henry Clay Frick, Samuel H. Kress, Isabella Stewart Gardner-were known for their great fortunes, but it was the important art that they acquired and their cultural philanthropy that ultimately ensured their fame and brought to American shores more Italian pictures than can be found anywhere else except Italy."-Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute "A Market for Merchant Princes provides an excellent survey and investigation of how great Italian Renaissance paintings came to enter American collections. Key collectors and institutions-such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, James Jackson Jarves, J. Pierpont Morgan, Henry Walters, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Samuel H. Kress-are discussed, as are the noted connoisseurs Morelli and Berenson, who had an important impact on them. This will become an essential reference work for the history of collecting in this country."-Eric M. Zafran, Wadsworth Atheneum

Not unlike their European forebears, Americans have historically held Italian Renaissance paintings in the highest possible regard, never allowing works by or derived from Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian to fall from favor. The ten essays in A Market for Merchant Princes trace the progression of American collectors' taste for Italian Renaissance masterpieces from the antebellum era, through the Gilded Age, to the later twentieth century. By focusing variously on issues of supply and demand, reliance on advisers, the role of travel, and the civic-mindedness of American collectors from the antebellum years through the post-World War II era, the authors bring alive the passions of individual collectors while chronicling the development of their increasingly sophisticated sensibilities. In almost every case, the collectors on whom these essays concentrate founded institutions that would make the art they had acquired accessible to the public, such as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Walters Art Gallery, The Frick Collection, and the John and Mable Ringling Museum. The contributors to the volume are Jaynie Anderson, Andrea Bayer, Edgar Peters Bowron, Virginia Brilliant, David Alan Brown, Clay M. Dean, Frederick Ilchman, Tiffany Johnston, Stanley Mazaroff, and Jennifer Tonkovich.