Provides a history of the buildings that have housed the Getty Museum collections, overviews the collections themselves, and offers a biography of J. Paul Getty

This revised and updated J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Collections includes many major objects that recently have been added to the collections, as well as the more familiar masterpieces frequent visitors have become acquainted with over the years from the antiquities, drawings, manuscripts, paintings, photographs, and sculpture and decorative arts holdings. Among the notable new accessions is a major collection of modern and contemporary sculpture, a 2005 gift from the Fran and Ray Stark Trust. Moreover, the new edition of the Handbook marks the historic moment at which the Museum commences operating on two sites simultaneously--the dazzling Getty Center on a hilltop in Brentwood and the magnificently reimagined Getty Villa in Malibu, devoted to Western antiquities. Readers who have not been among the millions of visitors to the two sites will find this Handbook an inducement for paying a visit; for those who have seen the collections, it will help them recall the experience and enrich their recollection.

"[V. 1] contains all the paintings belonging to the museum as of October, 1971, plus a few of the more important acquisitions made before the manuscript was submitted to the printer five months later." -- Preface.

This is the second edition of the original guidebook to the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection. The book introduces the collection, as divided into Greek and Roman antiquities, European paintings, and French decorative arts.

J. Paul Getty began to collect French decorative arts in the 1930s and continued to do so until his death in 1976. The Museum’s collection has continued to grow since then at a rapid pace and contains over three hundred individual pieces at the time this book is published. This volume illustrates fifty of them. The selection represents a cross section of the collection, which covers the period from approximately 1660 to 1800. In the eighteenth century it became fashionable in Parisian society to decorate the interiors of houses with Far Eastern materials such as lacquer and porcelain. This taste was catered to by the marchands-merciers, members of a guild who combined the functions of the modern interior decorator, the antique dealer, and the picture dealer. These men devised highly ingenious settings for Far Eastern porcelains to adapt their exotic character to the French interiors of the period. Information about them and their clientele has been used in cataloguing the Getty Museum’s collection of mounted oriental porcelain, which is large and of high quality. This book is not a catalogue, nor is it a mere picture book or checklist. Each piece has been chosen because it represents a particular aspect of the crafts involved in the production of objects that were made by Parisian craftsmen for the crown, the nobility, and the rich bourgeoisie. The pieces are arranged in chronological order. Translations of the French archival extracts, an index, and a concise bibliography have been provided.

This beautifully illustrated work brings together more than one hundred objects from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of European decorative arts. Included here is a generous selection of French and Italian furniture from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Masterpieces by André-Charles Boulle, Bernard (II) van Risenburgh, and others reveal the virtuoso craftsmanship that makes these objects such compelling examples of the furniture maker’s art. Many of the Museum’s finest pieces of porcelain, glass, and tin-glazed earthenware are also represented. Tapestries from Gobelins and Beauvais, bronze firedogs from Fontainebleau, and a lathe-turned ivory goblet of astonishing complexity from Saxony are among the other highlights of this handsome volume.

The catalogue is abundantly illustrated, including multiple views of each sculpture."--BOOK JACKET.