This authoritative catalogue of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's renowned collection of pre-1945 American paintings will greatly enhance scholarly and public understanding of one of the finest and most important collections of historic American art in the world. Composed of more than 600 objects dating from 1740 to 1945.

Peopled with literary figures such as Tennyson, Trollope, Browning, George Eliot, Henry James and Virginia Woolf, this book provides Anne Thackeray Ritchie's complete journals written in 1864-65 and 1878, an ample selection of her most interesting letters and a number of significant letters written to her. Because only a third of each journal has been previously published, this collection presents a valuable document of Ritchie's inner life, especially the account of her response to her father's death.