Description
Book SynopsisThe gripping biography of a man and his passion for art. In 1857, George A. Lucas, a young Baltimorean who was fluent in French and enamored of French art, arrived in Paris. There, he established an extensive personal network of celebrated artists and art dealers, becoming the quintessential French connection for American collectors. The most remarkable thing about Lucas was not the art that he acquired for his clients (who included William and Henry Walters, the founders of the Walters Art Museum, and John Taylor Johnston, the founding president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) but the massive collection of 18,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and etchings, as well as 1,500 books, journals, and other sources about French artists, that he acquired for himself. Paintings by Cabanel, Corot, and Daubigny, prints by Whistler, Manet, and Cassatt, and portfolios of information about hundreds of French artists filled his apartment and spilled into the adjacent flat of his mistress. B
Trade ReviewWith rich period detail and a genuine warmth towards its subject, it is eminently readable. Written for scholars and a general audience alike
A Paris Life, a Baltimore Treasure amplifies Lucas's vital role in linking collectors in the United States and French artists during the highpoint of American buying power, from the Civil War until the mid 1880s, a story that, to date, has only been told in temporary exhibitions of Lucas's collection.
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Nineteenth-Century Art WorldwideMazaroff details three decades of uncertainty over the ownership and importance of Lucas's gift. This story is greatly enhanced by the fact that most of the actors in the legal drama, which played out from the 1960s to the 1990s, gave interviews to the author; this oral history is the kind of vital inside information that scholars in future decades will relish. The book raises questions about art and money, personal enthusiasms and institutional priorities, and the grey areas in between, which make the process of shepherding gifts of art so political and complex.
—Jo Briggs,
The Art NewspaperTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1. The Cultivation of Lucas
2. The Wandering Road to Paris
3. Lucas and Paris in a Time of Transition
4. Lucas and Whistler
5. The Links to Lucas
6. From Ecouen to Barbizon
7. M, Eugene, and Maud
8. When Money Is No Object
9. The Lucas Collection
10. The Final Years
11. The Terms of Lucas's Will
12. A Collection in Search of a Home
13. The Shot across the Bow
14. The Glorification of Lucas
15. In Judge Kaplan's Court
16. Lucas Saved
Postscript
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
