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"Art Collectors and collecting United States Biography."
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Chasing beauty : the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner
Chronicles the life of the creator of one of America's most stunning museums-an American original whose own life was remade by art; includes archival photos of her world, museum and the art she collected.
BOOK
Collecting Shakespeare : the story of Henry and Emily Folger
The first biography of Henry and Emily Folger, who acquired the largest and finest collection of Shakespeare in the world. In Collecting Shakespeare, Stephen H. Grant recounts the American success story of Henry and Emily Folger. Shortly after marrying in 1885, the Folgers started buying, cataloging, and storing all manner of items about Shakespeare and his era. Emily earned a master's degree in Shakespeare studies. The frugal couple worked passionately as a tight-knit team during the Gilded Age, financing their hobby with the fortune Henry earned as president of Standard Oil Company of New York, where he was a trusted associate of John D. Rockefeller Sr. While a number of American universities offered to house the collection, the Folgers wanted to give it to the American people. Afraid the price of antiquarian books would soar if their names were revealed, they secretly acquired prime real estate on Capitol Hill near the Library of Congress. They commissioned the design and construction of an elegant building with a reading room, public exhibition hall, and the Elizabethan Theatre. The Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on the Bard's birthday on April 23, 1932. The library houses 82 First Folios, 277,000 books, and 60,000 manuscripts. It welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year and provides professors, scholars, graduate students, and researchers from around the world with access to the collections. It is also a vibrant center in Washington, DC, for cultural programs, including theater, concerts, lectures, and poetry readings. With unprecedented access to the primary sources within the Folger vault, Grant draws on interviews with surviving Folger relatives and visits to 35 related archives in the United States and in Britain to create a portrait of the remarkable couple who ensured that Shakespeare would have a beautiful home in America.
eBook
The maverick's museum : Albert Barnes and his American dream
From prominent critic and biographer Blake Gopnik comes a compelling new portrait of America's first great collector of modern art, Albert Coombs Barnes. Raised in a Philadelphia slum shortly after the Civil War, Barnes rose to earn a medical degree and then made a fortune from a pioneering antiseptic treatment for newborns. Never losing sight of the working-class neighbors of his youth, Barnes became a ruthless advocate for their rights and needs. His vast art collection -- 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos -- was dedicated to enriching their cultural lives. A miner was more likely to get access than a mine owner. Gopnik's meticulous research reveals Barnes as a fierce advocate for the egalitarian ideals of his era's progressive movement. But while his friends in the movement worked to reshape American society, Barnes wanted to transform the nation's aesthetic life, taking art out of the hands of the elite and making it available to the average American. The Maverick's Museum offers a vivid picture of one of America's great eccentrics. The sheer ferocity of Barnes's democratic ambitions left him with more enemies than allies among people of all classes, but for a circle of intimates, he was a model of intelligence, generosity, and loyalty. In this compelling portrait, Gopnik reveals a life shaped by contradictions, one that left a lasting impact. -- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
The Forrest J Ackerman Oeuvre
Although he is most remembered for his vast collection of science fiction memorabilia; his influential magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland ; and his frequent sci-fi convention appearances, Forrest J Ackerman (1916-2008) also left a sizeable body of work in print.
eBook
The Walpole Society Goes to Dinner
This is a profile of Edna Greenwood (1888-1972) who today is considered one of our first important collectors of American antiques, as well as our country's first significant collectors of culinaria. Whether she or anyone around her realized it at the time, she may have been our first American culinary historian of sorts. Beside being a mini-biography, this is also the story of an 18th-century-style dinner that Greenwood served one night in September 1946 to members of the Walpole Society, an exclusive all-male antiques-collector club founded in 1910 and still in existence. The meal took place at her restored Time Stone Farm in Marlborough, Massachusetts, where she and her family lived for decades without electricity and other conveniences. The narrative includes a description of the food and thumbnails of the guests (Henry du Pont was one). The epilogue discusses how her pioneering collections came to rest at the Smithsonian Institution.
Journal Article
\Let Us Hasten to Redeem the Time That Is Lost\: J. G. M. Ramsey's Role in the Collection and Promotion of Tennessee History
The son of an early East Tennessee settler, James Gettys McGready Ramsey saw it as his patriotic and filial duty to collect, preserve, and disseminate his knowledge and grand vision of the pioneer generation to scholars, whom he believed had overlooked the region's important contributions to American history. Although an 1863 fire destroyed his collections, Ramsey's work with state and local historical societies, his correspondence with historian and fellow collector Lyman C. Draper, and the 1853 publication of his Annals of Tennessee continue to influence the compilation and interpretation of the region's historical record.
Journal Article