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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