Faces of Power
Faces of Power

Author: Haim Gitler

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 9788894220018

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Roman Gold Coins from the Victor A. Adda Collection.

Sir John Evans 1823-1908
Sir John Evans 1823-1908

Author: Arthur MacGregor

Publisher: Ashmolean Museum

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13:

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The figure of Sir John Evans might stand as an exemplar for so many aspects of Victorian virtue. From beginnings as a clerk in the paper industry, he rose by hard work and astute judgement (not to mention advantageous marriage) to the peak of his profession. He became a phenomenon amongst the learned societies, holding office in the Royal Society, Numismatic Society, Society of Antiquaries, Geological Society and others. A thrice-married family man, he enjoyed a wide friendship, drawn mostly from the scholarly and scientific community and characterised as the 'Darwinist community'; with a strong sense of purpose they sought ways to extend the principles of natural selection to numismatic and antiquarian practice, and to establish protocols for the communication of visual evidence. Evans played key roles in topics as diverse as the water supply for the metropolis and the establishment of human antiquity. His archaeological and numismatic collections were internationally famous and formed the basis for a body of printed works produced over fifty years of sustained effort. In this easily readable but scholarly volume, fourteen authors examine Evans' enduring significance in a study that firmly establishes his place in the canon of leading figures of Victorian society.

Duveen
Duveen

Author: Meryle Secrest

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2005-11

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 0226744159

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Anyone who has admired Gainsborough's Blue Boy of the Huntington Collection in California, or Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owes much of his or her pleasure to art dealer Joseph Duveen (1869–1939). Regarded as the most influential—or, in some circles, notorious—dealer of the twentieth century, Duveen established himself selling the European masterpieces of Titian, Botticelli, Giotto, and Vermeer to newly and lavishly wealthy American businessmen—J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, to name just a few. It is no exaggeration to say that Duveen was the driving force behind every important private art collection in the United States. The first major biography of Duveen in more than fifty years and the first to make use of his enormous archive—only recently opened to the public—Meryle Secrest's Duveen traces the rapid ascent of the tirelessly enterprising dealer, from his humble beginnings running his father's business to knighthood and eventually apeerage. The eldest of eight sons of Jewish-Dutch immigrants, Duveen inherited an uncanny ability to spot a hidden treasure from his father, proprietor of a prosperous antiques business. After his father's death, Duveen moved the company into the riskier but lucrative market of paintings and quickly became one of the world's leading art dealers. The key to Duveen's success was his simple observation that while Europe had the art, America had the money; Duveen made his fortune by buying art from declining European aristocrats and selling them to the "squillionaires" in the United States. "By far the best account of Joseph Duveen's life in a biography that is rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written. [Secrest's] inquiries into early-twentieth-century collecting whet our appetite for a more general history of the art market in the first half of the twentieth century."—John Brewer, New York Review of Books