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Heda's Banquet Piece, Frans Hals' Willem Coymans, and Rembrandt's Lucretia. Paintings by these and other masters attracted the American collectors P. A. B. Widener, his son Joseph, and Andrew W. Mellon, whose bequests form the heart of the National Gallery's distinguished and remarkably cohesive collection of ninety-one Dutch paintings.

Provides a comprehensive treatment of the achievements of the school of the Dutch Golden Age. The volume is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; and the National Gallery, London, (May-July 1998).

Essays by American and Dutch scholars and museum curators explore the collecting and reception of seventeenth-century Dutch painting in America, from the colonial era through the Gilded Age to today.