LIBRARY NOTES
 
In 1870 a group of wealthy and culturally ambitious New Yorkers founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a Manhattan brownstone with a lackluster collection and not a single major work of art. Soon, America's new industrial tycoons began to compete for Europe's extraordinary Old Master pictures, laying claim to works by Vermeer, Titian, Rembrandt, and others, and causing a major migration of art across the Atlantic.
Cynthia Saltzman recounts the fierce competition to acquire some of the greatest paintings in the world and the boom in the market. At the center of this enterprise were the steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick, the banker J. Pierpont Morgan, the sugar king Harry Havemeyer and his wife Louisine, as well as the Boston aesthete Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the Metropolitan's president, Henry Marquand, whose dealers raced around Europe to negotiate purchases and sales of the rarest and most costly masterpieces.
Cynthia Saltzman holds degrees in art history from Harvard and
Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford. She is a former reporter for Forbes
and The Wall Street Journal and author of
The Portrait of Dr. Gachet.
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