This beautifully illustrated work brings together more than one hundred objects from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of European decorative arts. Included here is a generous selection of French and Italian furniture from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Masterpieces by André-Charles Boulle, Bernard (II) van Risenburgh, and others reveal the virtuoso craftsmanship that makes these objects such compelling examples of the furniture maker’s art. Many of the Museum’s finest pieces of porcelain, glass, and tin-glazed earthenware are also represented. Tapestries from Gobelins and Beauvais, bronze firedogs from Fontainebleau, and a lathe-turned ivory goblet of astonishing complexity from Saxony are among the other highlights of this handsome volume.

The Getty Museum’s collection of illuminated manuscripts, featured in this book, comprises masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance art. Dating from the tenth to the sixteenth century, they were produced in France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, England, Spain, Poland, and the eastern Mediterranean. Among the highlights are four Ottonian manuscripts, Romanesque treasures from Germany, Italy, and France, an English Gothic Apocalypse, and late medieval manuscripts painted by such masters as Jean Fouquet, Girolamo da Cremona, Simon Marmion, and Joris Hoefnagel. Included are glistening liturgical books, intimate and touching devotional books for private use, books of the Bible, lively histories by Giovanni Boccaccio and Jean Froissart, and a breathtaking Model Book of Calligraphy.

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of European sculpture featured in this volume ranges in date from the late fifteenth century to the very early twentieth and includes a wide variety of media: marble, bronze, alabaster, terracotta, plaster, wood, ivory, and gold. The earliest sculpture represented is the mysterious Saint Cyricus by Francesco Laurana; the latest is a shield-like portrait of Medusa by the eccentric Italian sculptor Vincenzo Gemito. Among the more than forty works included in this handsomely illustrated volume are sculptures by Antico (Bust of a Young Man); Cellini (a Satyr designed for Fontainebleau); Giambologna (a Female Figure that may represent Venus); Bernini (Boy with a Dragon); and Carpeaux (Bust of Jean-Léon Gérôme). Well represented here is the Museum’s splendid collection of Mannerist and early Baroque bronzes, including such masterpieces as Johann Gregor van der Schardt’s Mercury and two superb works by Adriaen de Vries: Juggling Man and Rearing Horse. These works are indicative of the extraordinary quality of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of post-Classical European sculpture.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the most common method of photography was the daguerreotype—Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s miraculous invention that captured in a camera visual images on a highly polished silver surface through exposure to light. In this book are presented nearly eighty masterpieces—many never previously published—from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive daguerreotype collection.

Provides a history of the buildings that have housed the Getty Museum collections, overviews the collections themselves, and offers a biography of J. Paul Getty

The J. Paul Getty Museum's paintings collection ranges from the fourteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. Among the finest examples of early Renaissance painting are the Madonna and Child by the Master of Saint Cecilia, Masaccio's Saint Andrew, and Gentile da Fabriano's richly painted Coronation of the Virgin. Typical of the High Renaissance are Andrea Mantegna's splendid Adoration of the Magi and Fra Bartolommeo's Rest on the Flight into Egypt. The art of the Netherlands in its Golden Age is represented by Jan Brueghel's much-loved painting The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark and by The Return from War, which he painted with Peter Paul Rubens, as well as a newly acquired and magnificent landscape by Hobbema, Rembrandt's Abduction of Europa, and Jan Steen's Drawing Lesson. Painting in France ranges from recently acquisitioned works by Poussin, Fragonard, and Lancret, through the Impressionism of Monet's seminal Sunrise and his Rouen Cathedral, while the modern age is exemplified by the Irises of Vincent van Gogh. Fernand Khnopff's Jeanne Kéfer, and Cézanne's Still Life with Apples.

This is the second edition of the original guidebook to the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection. The book introduces the collection, as divided into Greek and Roman antiquities, European paintings, and French decorative arts.