Old Masters, New World America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures

“One takes, moreover, an acute satisfaction in seeing America stretch out her long arm and rake in, across the green cloth of the wide Atlantic, the highest prizes of the game of civilization.” —Henry James, 1876

This groundbreaking book tells the story of the Gilded Age American collectors who exploited industrial fortunes to buy up paintings by the Old Masters of Europe—Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian, Vermeer and others. It brings to life the remarkable individuals who at the end of the 19th century set in motion a transatlantic migration of art—the coke and steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick, the Boston aesthete Isabella Stewart Gardner, the banker J. Pierpont Morgan, the sugar king H.O. Havemeyer and his wife Louisine, and Henry Gurdon Marquand, railroad financier and president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Drawing upon unpublished documents, this riveting account tracks the cut-throat competition, financial maneuvering, intrigue, and double-dealing surrounding the purchase of some of the most exquisite paintings in the world. Old Masters, New World is a riveting story of economics and beauty, private extravagance and public duty. It unveils the complex process by which a nation acquires its culture and its art.

Early Praise for Old Masters, New World

"Old Masters, New World, a lively, knowledgeable chronicle of a three-decade buying spree that relocated some of the Western world's most venerated paintings to the homes of American millionaires and, eventually, the museums they endowed.... Saltzman's graceful prose is equally effective in conveying the aesthetic splendor of an Old Master and the sharp financial maneuvers of an art dealer.”
— Chicago Tribune

"Saltzman revivifies the story by showing her readers how these alpha collectors schemed and maneuvered to outsmart the dealers and each other in their feverish quest for the best Rembrandt or the rarest Raphael.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer

"Saltzman draws on both her art history and business backgrounds in this vivacious, anecdotal, and perceptive chronicle of the 'great migration of art' across the Atlantic.... Art lovers will be thoroughly entertained by these tales of masterpiece fever.”
— Donna Seaman, Booklist

"A vividly narrated and highly informative study.... Saltzman deftly demonstrates that the often highly competitive process and volatile acquisition of cultural capital by dealers and their eager employers gives fascinating and important insight into the often fraught fusion of culture and commodity that built world-class American collections.”
— Publishers Weekly

"Cynthia Saltzman has written a history as luminous as some of the canvasses her Gilded Age moguls collected. A superb telling of how America’s great entrepreneurs came into possession of Europe's most beautiful paintings.”
—James Grant, author of Money of the Mind

"Cynthia Saltzman offers the reader a fascinating and fabulous peek into the Gilded Age, when vulgar tycoons and stuffy patricians competed shamelessly to own the best that Europe could offer.”
—Dr. Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

“Uncovering inside information that was meant to stay inside the dusty vaults of plundering robber barons, Cynthia Saltzman brings to vivid life an international gallery of Gilded Age icons—not just the New World magnates caricatured in Puck as money-bag magnets of Old World objets d’art, but real people, men and women alike, frantic to lay hands on the power and beauty and immortality—the madness, Henry James called it—of art. A chronicle of American conquest like no other, this is the kind of hard-to-put-down history that makes you, no matter what’s already hanging over your mantelpiece, suddenly greedy for the richness of great painting.”
—David Michaelis, author of N.C. Wyeth and Schultz and Peanuts