Old World Masters in New World Collections

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Old World Masters in New World Collections is a vivid celebration of European painting as it lives on in American private collections, where masterpieces once owned by kings, queens, princes, and legendary connoisseurs have become a kind of permanent exhibition in book form. Esther Singleton defends the rise of American collecting as a triumph of discernment over accumulation, crediting Sir Joseph Duveen with helping shape a market devoted to quality, and insisting that art's true purpose is to delight, refresh, and preserve beauty against the noise of fashion. The book surveys an astonishing range of Italian, Flemish, Dutch, German, Spanish, French, and English masters, from Botticelli, Raphael, and Fra Angelico to Titian, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Watteau, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and others. Alongside this grand procession of works, Singleton offers searching art-historical essays, including a nuanced study of Sienese painting and its lyrical, mystical contrast to Florentine naturalism. She also turns to Rembrandt and Hals with detective-like precision, tracing provenance, attribution, and rediscovery while praising their psychological force, late spiritual depth, and painterly brilliance. Richly illustrated and deeply informed, the volume presents American collections as a treasury of enduring European art.