Edward C. Moore (1827–1891) was the creative leader who brought Tiffany & Co. to unparalleled originality and success during the late nineteenth century. A silversmith, designer, and prodigious collector, Moore sought out exceptional objects from around the world, which he then used as inspiration for Tiffany’s innovative silver designs. This informative, richly illustrated volume, the first study of Moore’s life, collection, and influence, presents more than 170 examples from his vast collection, ranging from Greek and Roman glass to Spanish vases, Islamic metalwork, and Japanese textiles. These are juxtaposed with sixty magnificent silver objects created by the designers and artisans at Tiffany who were inspired by Moore’s acquisitions. Included among them are the world-famous Bryant Vase drawing upon Greek examples, a love cup featuring ornate “Saracenic” decoration, and a chocolate pot incorporating novel techniques influenced by Japanese ceramics and lacquerware. The illuminating texts have been enriched by groundbreaking research into contemporary sources such as newspapers and periodicals, the Tiffany & Co. Archives, and a newly identified technical manual and supervisor’s diaries, all of which provide an intimate look at the firm’s design processes and Moore’s role in shaping them. A valuable contribution to the history of American decorative arts, Collecting Inspiration illuminates both the legendary Tiffany aesthetic and the legacy of a significant collector, designer, and entrepreneur of the Gilded Age.

"Through a lively, anecdotal text - enriched with never-before-published information - and more than 300 illustrations, Tiffany & Co. design director John Loring illuminates hundreds of lavish silver objects as well as the world in which they were made and presented. We encounter royalty and business titans, sports champions and cultural luminaries, and the country's social elite, who were the primary patrons of the prestigious firm of silversmiths.".

This landmark publication reevaluates historical Native American art as a crucial but under-examined component of American art history. The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection, a transformative promised gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, includes masterworks from more than fifty cultures across North America. The works highlighted in this volume span centuries, from before contact with European settlers to the early twentieth century. In this beautifully illustrated volume, featuring all new photography, the innovative visions of known and unknown makers are presented in a wide variety of forms, from painting, sculpture, and drawing to regalia, ceramics, and baskets. The book provides key insights into the art, culture, and daily life of culturally distinct Indigenous peoples along with critical and popular perceptions over time, revealing that to engage Native art is to reconsider the very meaning of America. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

This monumental new book is the first to celebrate the greatest and most iconic paintings from the encyclopedic collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, one of the largest, most important, and most beloved museums in the world. This impressive volume's broad sweep of material, all from a single museum, makes it at once a universal history of painting and the ideal introduction to the iconic masterworks of this world-renowned institution. More than 1,000 lavish color illustrations and details of 500 masterpiece paintings, created over 5,000 years in cultures across the globe, are presented chronologically from the dawn of civilization to the present. These works represent a grand tour of painting from ancient Egypt and classical antiquity and prized Byzantine and medieval altarpieces, to paintings from Asia, India, Africa and the Americas, and and the greatest European and North American masters. The Metropolitan Museum of Art includes and introduction and illuminating texts about each artwork written specially for this volume by Kathryn Calley Galitz, whose experience as both curator and educator at the Met makes her uniquely qualified. European and American artists include Duccio, El Greco, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Bronzino, Caravaggio, Turner, Velázquez, Goya, Rubens, Rembrandt, Brueghel, Vermeer, David, Renior, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Degas, Sargent, Homer, Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Warhol. The artworks are arranged in rough chronological order, without regard to geography or culture, offering a visual timeline of the history of painting, from the earliest examples on pottery jars made over five thousand years ago to canvases on which the paint has barely dried. Freed from the constraints imposed by the physical layout of the Museum, the paintings resonate anew; and this chronological framework reveals unexpected visual affinities among the works. For those wishing to experience the unparalleled breadth and depth of the Met's collection, or study masterpieces of painting from throughout history, this important volume is sure to become a classic cherished by art lovers around the world.

New Mexico art patron Millicent Rogers (1902-1953) was a passionate collector who assembled a stellar collection of Navajo and Zuni silver and turquoise, Hopi silverwork, and Pueblo stone and shell jewellery during the late 1940s and early 1950s when fine late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century work could still be found. Her collection provided the foundation for what has become one of America's most important repositories for the aesthetic achievements of Native American artists oft he Southwest: The Millicent Rogers Museum.

You are what you own. So believed many of the elite men and women of Renaissance Italy. The notion that a person's belongings transmit something about their personal history, status, and "character" was renewed in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Objects of Virtue explores the multiple meanings and values of the objects with which families like the Medici, Este, and Gonzaga surrounded themselves. This lavishly illustrated volume examines the complicated relationships between the so-called "fine arts"--painting and sculpture--and artifacts of other kinds for which artistry might be as important as utility-furniture, jewelry, and vessels made of gold, silver, and bronze, precious and semi-precious stone, glass, and ceramic. The works discussed were designed and made by artists as famous as Andrea Mantegna, Raphael, and Michelangelo, as well as by lesser-known specialists--goldsmiths, gem-engravers, glassmakers, and maiolica painters.

An award-winning historian recounts the history of American liberty through the stories of thirteen essential documents Nationalism is inevitable: It supplies feelings of belonging, identity, and recognition. It binds us to our neighbors and tells us who we are. But increasingly -- from the United States to India, from Russia to Burma -- nationalism is being invoked for unworthy ends: to disdain minorities or to support despots. As a result, nationalism has become to many a dirty word. In Give Me Liberty, award-winning historian and biographer Richard Brookhiser offers up a truer and more inspiring story of American nationalism as it has evolved over four hundred years. He examines America's history through thirteen documents that made the United States a new country in a new world: a free country. We are what we are because of them; we stay true to what we are by staying true to them. Americans have always sought liberty, asked for it, fought for it; every victory has been the fulfillment of old hopes and promises. This is our nationalism, and we should be proud of it.