Slow Dancing Through Time

Literature & Fiction

Dozois, Gardner R.

United States

Ursus Pr

"This is not an absolutely correct title, for I began collecting before I was sixteen and I am now over sixty and I am still collecting, but it will serve." Thus begins Louisine W. Havemeyer's memoir, a rare Gilded Age testimonial on forming one of America's greatest art collections. And it was as a teenager in Paris in 1874 that she met the thirty-year-old artist Mary Cassatt who would lead her to Degas's Ballet Rehearsal in a shop window. By the time she was twenty-two she had also acquired works by Pissarro and Monet. She was very probably the first American to collect the work of these three artists. After her marriage to the "sugar king," H. O. Havemeyer, they collected Asian art in quantity and Old Master and Barbizon paintings. In the 1890s, they would return to Mrs. Havemeyer's initial enthusiasm: modern French painting. They formed major collections of the works of Corot, Courbet, Manet, Degas, and Monet. Mrs. Havemeyer also describes their passion for El Greco and Goya. She relates her encounters with fellow collectors such as Henry Clay Frick, Charles Lang Freer, and Isabella Stewart Gardner; as well as her dealings with art dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard. "Museums have histories of their own, but how little is known of the making of private collections." And so Mrs. Havemeyer "...jot[ted] down the interesting stories... concerning the purchase of this picture or that object, to relate the rare remarks of the celebrated painters [she] met, to record the curious circumstances attending the purchase of some unusual work of art, to keep for the following generations... valuable information for art collectors." And for all readers interested in connoisseurship, nineteenth-century art, and the cultural education of America.

Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector

Havemeyer, Louisine W.

Arts & Photography

From the rear cover of this 347 page book: "'Museums have histories of their own, but little is known of the making of private collections.' And so Louisine W. Havermyer 'jotted down the interesting stories concerning the purchase of this picture or that object, to relate the rare remarks of the celebrated painters she met, to record the curious circumstances attending the purchase of some unusual work of art, to keep for the following generations, valuable information for art collectors.' And for all the readers interested in connoisseurship, nineteenth-century art, and the cultural education of America."

Giovanni Bellini is being published for the first time since 1901. Highly popular at the time of its original publication (three editions were published between 1899 and 1901), Roger Fry's monograph was instrumental in rescuing Bellini from the oblivion of a Victorian-era reputation by reinterpreting and revaluing his art for an early twentieth-century audience. Giving a succinct but definitive view of Bellini's career, Fry not only brought to bear the new "scientific" connoisseurship in his analysis of individual pictures and their chronology, but he also brought a keen interest into Bellini's innovative use of semi-transparent oil glazes, the psychological depth of his subjects, and Bellini's profound sensitivity to nature. As a painter himself, Fry had the critical advantage of studying Bellini with a sympathy deepened by his own close awareness of aesthetic problems. Roger Fry - champion of modernism, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, founder of the Omega Workshops, and author of important monographs on Cezanne and Matisse - thus began his career in the elite but highly competitive group of critics and connoisseurs who were engaged in the massive aesthetic revisionist project of clarifying Italian Renaissance art. Bernard Berenson, the foremost figure in this undertaking, was Fry's mentor. Giovanni Bellini was Fry's first book. It is now available again after almost one hundred years and provides not only an original and compelling view of the Venetian Renaissance master, but also a more complete perspective on the career of Roger Fry.

Giovanni Bellini (Artist's Library, No. 2.)

Roger Eliot Fry

Individual Artists

The four great studies of the Venetian, Florentine, Central Italian, and Northern Italian painters of the Renaissance are here brought together, providing for the first time a complete survey of Italian Renaissance art from Cimabue to Corregio. Among the the painters and sculptors discussed in detail are Giotto, Bellini, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Tintoretto, Titian, Velazquez, Veronese, and Verrochio.

Italian Painters of the Renaissance

BERENSON, Bernard

Present-day museums are almost as diverse in character as the collections that they contain, yet all are united by a historical thread leading back to a common origin in collections of "curiousities" in 16th and 17th-century Europe.  In this unique, thorough account of the history of collecting, 35 noted authors discuss museums and their methods and sources of acquisitions, and the principles they used in cataloguing, publishing, and display.

The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Europe

The English As Collectors: A Documentary Source Book

Herrmann, Frank

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Books by Ursus Pr

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Ursus Pr publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Slow Dancing Through Time

Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector

Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector

Giovanni Bellini (Artist's Library, No. 2.)

Italian Painters of the Renaissance

The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Europe

The English As Collectors: A Documentary Source Book