A fully illustrated study of the Duveen Brothers Company, the firm behind many of the United States' most famous museum collections.

Anyone who has admired Gainsborough's Blue Boy of the Huntington Collection in California, or Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owes much of his or her pleasure to art dealer Joseph Duveen (1869–1939). Regarded as the most influential—or, in some circles, notorious—dealer of the twentieth century, Duveen established himself selling the European masterpieces of Titian, Botticelli, Giotto, and Vermeer to newly and lavishly wealthy American businessmen—J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, to name just a few. It is no exaggeration to say that Duveen was the driving force behind every important private art collection in the United States. The first major biography of Duveen in more than fifty years and the first to make use of his enormous archive—only recently opened to the public—Meryle Secrest's Duveen traces the rapid ascent of the tirelessly enterprising dealer, from his humble beginnings running his father's business to knighthood and eventually apeerage. The eldest of eight sons of Jewish-Dutch immigrants, Duveen inherited an uncanny ability to spot a hidden treasure from his father, proprietor of a prosperous antiques business. After his father's death, Duveen moved the company into the riskier but lucrative market of paintings and quickly became one of the world's leading art dealers. The key to Duveen's success was his simple observation that while Europe had the art, America had the money; Duveen made his fortune by buying art from declining European aristocrats and selling them to the "squillionaires" in the United States. "By far the best account of Joseph Duveen's life in a biography that is rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written. [Secrest's] inquiries into early-twentieth-century collecting whet our appetite for a more general history of the art market in the first half of the twentieth century."—John Brewer, New York Review of Books

Offers fresh insight into these exquisite masterworks by Pierre Gouthière (1732-1813), the celebrated gilder to the French kings.

"A thematic biography of Marjorie Merriweather Post through the prism of Post's multi-faceted interests and accomplishments"--

Presents 90 outstanding pieces made by celebrated jeweller Fabergé, including two of the famous imperial Easter eggs.

A major new volume on the exceptional art collection of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, including masterpieces by Raphael, Titian, Veronese, Correggio, Poussin, Rubens, and Rembrandt.

Encompasses an impressive and engaging variety of fabulous objects from the most important faïence centres, dating from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century.

J. Paul Getty began to collect French decorative arts in the 1930s and continued to do so until his death in 1976. The Museum’s collection has continued to grow since then at a rapid pace and contains over three hundred individual pieces at the time this book is published. This volume illustrates fifty of them. The selection represents a cross section of the collection, which covers the period from approximately 1660 to 1800. In the eighteenth century it became fashionable in Parisian society to decorate the interiors of houses with Far Eastern materials such as lacquer and porcelain. This taste was catered to by the marchands-merciers, members of a guild who combined the functions of the modern interior decorator, the antique dealer, and the picture dealer. These men devised highly ingenious settings for Far Eastern porcelains to adapt their exotic character to the French interiors of the period. Information about them and their clientele has been used in cataloguing the Getty Museum’s collection of mounted oriental porcelain, which is large and of high quality. This book is not a catalogue, nor is it a mere picture book or checklist. Each piece has been chosen because it represents a particular aspect of the crafts involved in the production of objects that were made by Parisian craftsmen for the crown, the nobility, and the rich bourgeoisie. The pieces are arranged in chronological order. Translations of the French archival extracts, an index, and a concise bibliography have been provided.

A major new volume on the life of Pierre Gouthière (1732-1813), the celebrated Parisian gilder to the French kings.

A powerful history of Jewish art collectors in France, and how an embrace of art and beauty was met with hatred and destruction In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt—the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of “invading” France’s cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind—many ultimately donated to the French state—were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.