This is the story of the remarkable collector, art dealer, researcher, art historian and author Frits Lugt (1884-1970). From 1901 to 1915 he worked at a Amsterdam auction company. From 1915 he collected paintings, drawings, prints and antiques. Not restricting himself to collect works of great artists like Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and Watteau, Lugt also succeeded in acquiring exceptional artworks by relatively smaller artists. Translation of the original Dutch edition from 2010 (978-90-6868-551-0).

A deep dive into American printmaking from 1960 to the present day The American Dream: pop to the present, published to accompany an exhibition at the British Museum, presents an overview of the development of American printmaking since 1960, paying particular attention to such key figures as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ed Ruscha as well as Louise Bourgeois, Kara Walker, and Julie Mehretu. With more than 200 key works by nearly seventy artists, this fully illustrated publication traces the creative momentum in American printmaking over the past six decades—from the moment pop art burst onto the New York and West Coast scenes in the early 1960s, the rise of minimalism, conceptual art, and photorealism in the 1970s, to the different responses of artists working today. Using innovative techniques and appealing to a wide audience, American printmaking was the ideal medium to express the USA’s power and influence, and to highlight contentious issues such as race, AIDS, and feminism.

This sumptuously illustrated volume examines the impact of Indian art and culture on Rembrandt (1606–1669) in the late 1650s. By pairing Rembrandt’s twenty-two extant drawings of Shah Jahan, Jahangir, Dara Shikoh, and other Mughal courtiers with Mughal paintings of similar compositions, the book critiques the prevailing notion that Rembrandt “brought life” to the static Mughal art. Written by scholars of both Dutch and Indian art, the essays in this volume instead demonstrate how Rembrandt’s contact with Mughal painting inspired him to draw in an entirely new, refined style on Asian paper—an approach that was shaped by the Dutch trade in Asia and prompted by the curiosity of a foreign culture. Seen in this light, Rembrandt’s engagement with India enriches our understanding of collecting in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, the Dutch global economy, and Rembrandt’s artistic self-fashioning. A close examination of the Mughal imperial workshop provides new insights into how Indian paintings came to Europe as well as how Dutch prints were incorporated into Mughal compositions.

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship -- the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi's collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet's museum of religious objects and Goncourt's private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.

An investigation into the art of a mysterious Dutch painter who left no written records behind. His paintings are curious, his figures introverted, and his street scenes strangely stage-like. Jacobus Vrel recorded everyday life in Holland during the seventeenth century and conjured his own idiosyncratic world at the same time. This volume presents the fascinating complete oeuvre of a painter whose works were thought in the nineteenth century to have been painted by Vermeer. Jacobus Vrel is like a phantom. No written sources describing the artist or his work have ever been discovered. His existence is documented only by some fifty surviving works which can hardly be compared with those of his contemporaries. His works, in their austerity and sometimes oppressive silence, seem unexpectedly modern, and have been compared to the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi. With detective-like investigative flair, and drawing on extensive technical examinations of the paintings, this book explores the mysterious pictures of this recently rediscovered painter.