Old Masters, New World

Description

How America bought Europe’s soul. Cynthia Saltzman’s Old Masters, New World tells the riveting story of the Gilded Age collectors who crossed the Atlantic and bought Europe’s artistic crown jewels: the Fricks, the Morgans, the Havemeyers, raiding the old world’s palaces for the new world’s museums — Rembrandts by the dozen.

Saltzman writes history like a thriller: the auctions, the dealers, the rivalries, the masterpieces changing hands for sums that shocked the world. At the turn of the twentieth century, American money met European heritage — and the Met, the Frick, and the National Gallery are the magnificent result.

Fascinating and impeccably researched. For museum-goers: the secret history of the walls you love. You will never walk those galleries innocently again. Saltzman’s tale of art on the move is history at its most entertaining. The Gilded Age in all its glory: ambitious, acquisitive, and oddly noble. You will devour it.

How did America’s greatest museums come to hold the world’s finest European art? In Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures, Cynthia Saltzman tells the riveting story of the Gilded Age collectors who crossed the Atlantic and bought Europe’s artistic crown jewels.

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At the turn of the twentieth century, as Europe’s aristocrats sold off ancestral treasures, America’s new millionaires arrived with fortunes to spend: J.P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, Joseph Widener, and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Advised by dealers like Joseph Duveen, they competed fiercely for Titians, Rembrandts, Vermeers, and Botticellis — masterpieces that had graced palaces and churches for centuries.

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Saltzman reveals the ambition, rivalry, and occasional deception behind these spectacular acquisitions, and shows how they transformed American museums — the Metropolitan, the National Gallery, the Frick Collection — into world-class institutions almost overnight.

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Part art history, part detective story, this beautifully researched book brings the drama of the great art raid to vivid life. A must-read for art lovers, museum-goers, and anyone who has ever wondered how the Old Masters ended up in the New World.

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