This beautiful volume presents colorplates and essays covering 100 masterpieces of European art from one of America's finest collections, housed in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Gerard ter Borch (1617-1681) was unequalled among his Dutch peers for capturing the elegance & grace of wealthy Dutch society in his portraiture. A major influence on Vermeer, ter Borch has not received the attention he deserves & this is the first major English language text about his work.

Smith College art professors Davis and Leshko showcase 100 paintings and sculptures from their institution's vaunted collection, encompassing Americans from Gilbert Stuart to Louise Nevelson and Europeans from Corot to Henry Moore. In the introduction, how and why Smith became steward of such a fine body of work is ascribed to the school's high-minded mission and its generous alumni donors. The rest of the book is divided into two sections, one American and the other European. Each individual full-color reproduction is accompanied by an informative one-page essay and a brief reading list. During several years of renovations at Smith, the items featured in this book are traveling to diverse sites, which should increase the book's appeal. 118 colour & 1 b/w illustrations

This timely publication ponders the presence of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in art, and seeks to evoke the affective rationale underlying Mary's centuries old fascination.

This stunning examination of the last years of Édouard Manet's life and career is the first book to explore the transformation of his style and subject matter in the 1870s and early 1880s. The name Manet often evokes the provocative, heroically scaled pictures he painted in the 1860s for the Salon, but in the late 1870s and early 1880s the artist produced quite a different body of work: stylish portraits of actresses and demimondaines, luscious still lifes, delicate pastels, intimate watercolors, and impressionistic scenes of suburban gardens and Parisian cafés. Often dismissed as too pretty and superficial by critics, these later works reflect Manet’s elegant social world, propose a radical new alignment of modern art with fashionable femininity, and record the artist’s unapologetic embrace of beauty and visual pleasure in the face of death. Featuring nearly three hundred illustrations and nine fascinating essays by established and emerging Manet specialists, a technical analysis of the late Salon painting Jeanne (Spring), a selection of the artist’s correspondence, a chronology, and more, Manet and Modern Beauty brings a diverse range of approaches to bear on a little-studied area of this major artist’s oeuvre.

A curator of Dutch drawings at the Albertina surveys the work of Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, Philips Koninck, and others, presenting the various forms of art that dominated the scene in seventeenth-century Holland. 112 colour illustrations