Overview

The gripping biography of a man and his passion for art. In 1857, George A. Lucas, a young Baltimorean who was fluent in French and enamored of French art, arrived in Paris. There, he established an extensive personal network of celebrated artists and art dealers, becoming the quintessential French connection for American collectors. The most remarkable thing about Lucas was not the art that he acquired for his clients (who included William and Henry Walters, the founders of the Walters Art Museum, and John Taylor Johnston, the founding president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) but the massive collection of 18,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and etchings, as well as 1,500 books, journals, and other sources about French artists, that he acquired for himself. Paintings by Cabanel, Corot, and Daubigny, prints by Whistler, Manet, and Cassatt, and portfolios of information about hundreds of French artists filled his apartment and spilled into the adjacent flat of his mistress. Based primarily on Lucas’s notes and diaries, as well as thousands of other archival documents, Stanley Mazaroff’s A Paris Life, A Baltimore Treasure tells the fascinating story of how Lucas brought together the most celebrated French artists with the most prominent and wealthy American collectors of the time. It also details how, nearing the end of his life, Lucas struggled to find a future home for his collection, eventually giving it to Baltimore’s Maryland Institute. Without the means to care for the collection, the Institute loaned it to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where most of the art was placed in storage and disappeared from public view. But in 1990, when the Institute proposed to auction or otherwise sell the collection, it rose from obscurity, reached new glory as an irreplaceable cultural treasure, and became the subject of an epic battle fought in and out of court that captivated public attention and enflamed the passions of art lovers and museum officials across the nation. A Paris Life, A Baltimore Treasure is a richly illustrated portrayal of Lucas's fascinating life as an agent, connoisseur, and collector of French mid-nineteenth-century art. And, as revealed in the book, following Lucas's death, his enormous collection continued to have a vibrant life of its own, presenting new challenges to museum officials in studying, conserving, displaying, and ultimately saving the collection as an important and intrinsic part of the culture of our time.

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9781421424446

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Reviews

With rich period detail and a genuine warmth towards its subject, it is eminently readable. Written for scholars and a general audience alike A Paris Life, a Baltimore Treasure amplifies Lucas's vital role in linking collectors in the United States and French artists during the highpoint of American buying power, from the Civil War until the mid 1880s, a story that, to date, has only been told in temporary exhibitions of Lucas's collection. * Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide *

With rich period detail and a genuine warmth towards its subject, it is eminently readable. Written for scholars and a general audience alike A Paris Life, a Baltimore Treasure amplifies Lucas's vital role in linking collectors in the United States and French artists during the highpoint of American buying power, from the Civil War until the mid 1880s, a story that, to date, has only been told in temporary exhibitions of Lucas's collection. --Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

With rich period detail and a genuine warmth towards its subject, it is eminently readable. Written for scholars and a general audience alike A Paris Life, a Baltimore Treasure amplifies Lucas's vital role in linking collectors in the United States and French artists during the highpoint of American buying power, from the Civil War until the mid 1880s, a story that, to date, has only been told in temporary exhibitions of Lucas's collection. * Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide * Mazaroff details three decades of uncertainty over the ownership and importance of Lucas's gift. This story is greatly enhanced by the fact that most of the actors in the legal drama, which played out from the 1960s to the 1990s, gave interviews to the author; this oral history is the kind of vital inside information that scholars in future decades will relish. The book raises questions about art and money, personal enthusiasms and institutional priorities, and the grey areas in between, which make the process of shepherding gifts of art so political and complex. -- Jo Briggs * The Art Newspaper *

Mazaroff details three decades of uncertainty over the ownership and importance of Lucas's gift. This story is greatly enhanced by the fact that most of the actors in the legal drama, which played out from the 1960s to the 1990s, gave interviews to the author; this oral history is the kind of vital inside information that scholars in future decades will relish. The book raises questions about art and money, personal enthusiasms and institutional priorities, and the grey areas in between, which make the process of shepherding gifts of art so political and complex. -- Jo Briggs * The Art Newspaper * With rich period detail and a genuine warmth towards its subject, it is eminently readable. Written for scholars and a general audience alike A Paris Life, a Baltimore Treasure amplifies Lucas's vital role in linking collectors in the United States and French artists during the highpoint of American buying power, from the Civil War until the mid 1880s, a story that, to date, has only been told in temporary exhibitions of Lucas's collection. * Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide *

Author Information

Stanley Mazaroff is an independent art historian and the author of Henry Walters and Bernard Berenson: Collector and Connoisseur. Recognized annually in The Best Lawyers in America, Mazaroff retired from the active practice of law in 2003 to study art history at Johns Hopkins University.

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