Essays by James A. Ganz and Richard R. Brettell

$45.00 Hardcover
$29.95 Softcover

This beautifully produced volume is devoted to a remarkable collection of European paintings, including an extraordinary group of French Impressionist works, from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Published on the occasion of a major traveling exhibition of the core of the institute’s Impressionist holdings, Great French Paintings from the Clark features more than seventy of the most important nineteenth-century European paintings in the collection, including masterpieces by Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Morisot, Manet, Degas, Renoir, and Gauguin, as well as key earlier works by Corot and Millet and academic paintings by artists such as Gérôme, Alma-Tadema, and Bouguereau.

Two insightful essays by leading scholars of nineteenth-century European art are illustrated with intriguing archival imagery and superb works from other areas of the Clark collection, such as Dürer, Piero della Francesca, Rodin, and Sargent. James A. Ganz offers a fascinating biographical introduction to Sterling Clark, a self-trained connoisseur and heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune who, with his French-born wife, Francine, amassed one of the most important private collections in the United States. Richard R. Brettell discusses the Clarks in the broader context of other early twentieth-century collectors such as Albert Barnes, Henry Clay Frick, and Duncan Phillips. Following these texts are lavish reproductions—including numerous full-spread details—and illuminating catalogue entries about each painting.

Reproducing works ranging from the atmospheric naturalist landscapes of the Barbizon school to the bold experiments of Post-Impressionism, this remarkably researched and illustrated volume makes a significant contribution to the study of the originality and diversity of nineteenth-century art.

James A. Ganz is Curator of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and former Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Clark.

Richard R. Brettell is Margaret McDermott Distinguished Professor of Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is a former director of the Dallas Museum of Art and is the author of numerous books on nineteenth-century European painting.
 

240 pages, 9 5/8 x 11 inches
90 color and 20 black-and-white illustrations
2011
Published by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and Skira Rizzoli Publications

ISBN 978-0-8478-3553-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-931102-91-2 (softcover)