To celebrate the Neue Galerie's twentieth-anniversary year, an exhibition will be presented of selections from the collection of its co-founder. The accompanying book continues with the theme of the tenth anniversary exhibition. Whereas the earlier show and publication focused on pieces from the third century BC to the twentieth century AD from Austria, France, and Germany, this exhibition and book will represent various centuries and media, highlighting Greek and Roman works, and Italian thirteenth- and fourteenth-century gold-ground paintings. Essays by distinguished art historians and curators will reflect on the breadth of these special fields, providing a background for various works, and their incorporation into the collection of the Neue Galerie's co-founder.

In this volume, forty-two remarkable paintings collected by Robert Lehman and his father, Philip Lehman, are discussed at length in light of recent technical and art historical research. This is the eighth in a projected series of sixteen volumes that will catalogue the entire Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum.

Among the works catalogued here are Petrus Christus's "Goldsmith in His Shop" of 1449, which is justly famous as one of the first northern European paintings to depict everyday life, and Hans Memling's "Portrait of a Young Man" (ca. 1475-80), in which the sitter is posed before a landscape, a formula that had lasting repercussions in Italian as well as Northern art. Also included is Memling's "Annunciation, " one of his finest and most original works. Well-known paintings by Simon Marmion, Jean Hey, Gerard David, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Younger, Hans Holbein, Gerard Terborch, Pieter de Hooch, Rembrandt, and El Greco all represent in their own way the best of the era and place in which they were created, as do masterful portraits by Francisco de Goya, George Romney, and Sir Henry Raeburn. All the paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection are reproduced in full color, supplemented by numerous comparative duotone illustrations.