Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1985. As New. Item #10103
ISBN: 0912298588

Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1985. First Edition. Quarto (32x26x2cm); 203pp, including chronology for the Cone acquisitions. Eighty-one reproductions of the pieces in the collection; over 50 documentary photographs.

Cochineal red boards with silver stamping on spine and front panel. No jacket, as issued. Note that the photographs show our one copy no longer in shrinkwrap; the copies we're offering, however, retain their original shrinkwrap.

Uncommon in retail in original hardcover, this volume is Fine, indeed As New, because it is a Rip Van Winkle find, coming to us directly from the author's allotment of original issue copies.

Dr. Claribel Cone (1864-1929) and Miss Etta Cone (1870-1949) are the renowned Baltimore sisters whose social circle included Picasso, Matisse, Gertrude Stein, and the dazzling, if lesser, lights who circled around those supernovae. The sisters’ collecting story is much more interesting than most, since they didn’t acquire their art on gilded sprees or at auction the way their era’s coal magnates and rail tycoons did—we mention no names. Money they certainly had, but they also had friends, and it was that social circle that give birth to one of the most celebrated private collections in the United States, which came to constitute an entire wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Gertrude Stein’s reprinted tribute to them precedes the full text by Brenda Richardson, herself remarkable in being the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art for over 20 years. The volume comes to us directly from her shelves.

Price: $40.00