This is the first critical catalogue of the collection of nineteenth-century paintings and drawings in the Norton Simon Museum of Art. World-renowned for its strength in works by the French impressionists and post-impressionists—Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Cézanne and Van Gogh—the Museum also houses outstanding paintings by the Realist Gustave Courbet, and the Barbizon painter Camille Corot among others. Each of the 138 artworks featured in the book is illustrated in color and accompanied by a full catalogue entry, comprising critical essay exhibition and ownership history, bibliography and conservation notes. Color reproductions of comparative works from other collections—public and private—are also included.
Stephen Eisenman and Richard Brettell have conjoined their unique perspectives on nineteenth-century art to summarize existing scholarship of the period, and most of all, shed new light on a collection of important but little-studied masterpieces. They have also collaborated in writing an introduction to the catalogue that for the first time places the collector Norton Simon in the historical, intellectual, and economic context of his time.
