Among the finest examples of European craftsmanship are the clocks produced for the luxury trade in the eighteenth century. The J. Paul Getty Museum is fortunate to have in its decorative arts collection twenty clocks dating from around 1680 to 1798: eighteen produced in France and two in Germany. They demonstrate the extraordinary workmanship that went into both the design and execution of the cases and the intricate movements by which the clocks operated. In this handsome volume, each clock is pictured and discussed in detail, and each movement diagrammed and described. In addition, biographies of the clockmakers and enamelers are included, as are indexes of the names of the makers, previous owners, and locations.

The authors, Danielle Kisluk-Grosheide and Jeffrey Munger, are curators in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. They oversaw the recent reinstallation of the Wrightsman Galleries --Book Jacket.

The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 6/7 is a compendium of articles and notes pertaining to the Museum's permanent collections of antiquities, paintings, sculpture, and works of art. This volume includes an editorial statement by the journal’s editors: Burton B. Fredericksen, curator of Paintings, Jiří Frel, curator of Antiquities, and Gillian Wilson, curator of Decorative Arts. Conservation problems are discussed along with articles written by K. Christiansen, B. B. Fredericksen, S. Holo, G. Wilson, B. L. Shifman, M. Shapiro, J. Frel, D. M. Brinkerhoff, C. C. Vermeule, G. Koch, S. Downey, l. Kilian-Dirlmeier, C. Cardon, F. Brommer, M. A. Del Chiaro, P. Visonà, J. Cody, R. Mellor, D. L. Thompson, E. Langlotz, P. Zazoff, S. Knudsen Morgan, M. Jentoft-Nilsen, and A. Manzoni.

This beautifully produced volume is the first to survey the Metropolitan Museum's world-renowned collection of European furniture. One hundred and three superb examples from the Museum's vast holdings are featured. They originated in workshops in England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Russia, or Spain and date from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. A number of them belonged to such important historical figures as Pope Urban VIII, Louis XIV, Madame de Pompadour, and Napoleon. The selection includes chairs, tables, beds, cabinets, commodes, settees and sofas, bookcases and standing shelves, desks, fire screens, athéniennes, coffers, chests, mirrors and frames, showcases, and lighting equipment. There is also one purely decorative piece, a superb vase made for a Russian noble family who, according to one awestruck viewer, "owned all the malachite mines in the world." The makers of some of the objects are unknown, but most of the pieces can be identified by label, documentation, or style as the work of an outstanding European designer-craftsman, such as André-Charles Boulle, Thomas Chippendale, David Roentgen, or Karl Friedrich Schinkel.