Description
Book SynopsisEssays by American and Dutch scholars and museum curators explore the collecting and reception of seventeenth-century Dutch painting in America, from the colonial era through the Gilded Age to today.
Trade Review“This book provides answers for anyone who has ever wondered why there are so many great Dutch paintings in U.S. collections. Essays by leading curators and scholars draw on the history of art, as well as an understanding of cultural, economic, and political conditions, to illuminate the American taste for seventeenth-century Dutch painting.”
—Emilie Gordenker,Director, Mauritshuis, The Hague
“Drawing on the experience and insights of many of her colleagues in museums and the academy, Esmée Quodbach brings us an impressively broad overview of the early collectors of Dutch art in America. This essential volume provides illuminating context for major figures such as J. P. Morgan and welcomes unsung heroes such as Robert Gilmor, Jr., onto this stage, but also lifts the curtain on early colonial as well as contemporary collections. These varied accounts are spiked with color, drama, and highlights, including the story of the wealthy collector who has to ask, ‘Who is Vermeer?’”
—David de Witt,Bader Curator of European Art, Queen’s University
“Americans esteem Dutch art for its portrayal of the apparent reality of everyday life, unpretentious and tidy citizenry, and seemingly naturalistic landscapes and seascapes. This beautiful volume of authoritative essays on the collecting of Dutch art is not only for specialists but also for general readers, who will find many familiar names of businessmen who were the founders or enrichers of American museums. Foremost among these are the National Gallery, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as privately founded galleries—the Frick, the Morgan, and the Getty. Among the many topics discussed are the early presence of Dutch paintings in New Netherland, parallel appreciation for Vermeer and American painters of interiors, European-born scholars and dealers who helped shape American appreciation for the arts, the rivalry among collectors for the acquisition of declared masterpieces, and the usefulness and value of painted and printed copies for display and instruction. The acquisition of Dutch art is as much about the art as it is about social history.”
—A. Golahny Choice
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Esmée Quodbach
Introduction: A Taste for Dutch Art
Peter C. Sutton
Part I
The Early Years: The Formation of America’s Taste for Dutch Art
1 “Pictures chiefly painted in oils, on boards”: Dutch Paintings in Colonial New York
Louisa Wood Ruby
2 Robert Gilmor, Jr.’s “Real” Dutch Paintings
Lance Humphries
3 Collecting Old Dutch Masters: Originals, Interpretations, Copies, and Reproductions
Annette Stott
4 Wilhelm von Bode and Collecting in America
Catherine B. Scallen
Part II
The Gilded Age: Great Collections and Collectors of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art
5 Golden Age Paintings in the Gilded Age: New York Collectors and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1870–1920
Walter Liedtke
6 “They leave us as they find us, they never elevate”: John G. Johnson and the Dutch Masters
Lloyd DeWitt
7 Collecting Vermeer, 1887–1919
Esmée Quodbach
8 Collecting Dutch Paintings in Boston
Ronni Baer
9 The Dutch Painting Collection at the National Gallery of Art
Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr.
Part III
The Twentieth Century: The Dissemination of Dutch Art Across America and the Dutch Reaction
10 The Passionate Eye of W. R. Valentiner: Shaping the Canon of Dutch Painting in America
Dennis P. Weller
11 Unexpected Rivals for the Dutch: Competing with the Americans for Holland’s National Heritage in Great Britain and Elsewhere
Peter Hecht
12 Golden Opportunities: Collecting Rembrandt in Southern California
Anne T. Woollett
13 Has the Great Age of Collecting Dutch Old Master Paintings Come to an End?
Quentin Buvelot
References
List of Contributors
Index
