Celebrating Florida: Works of Art from the Vickers Collection (Florida Sesquicentennial)

A full-color collection of important paintings, drawings, and prints

Celebrating Florida: Works of Art from the Vickers Collection illustrates in full color a generous selection of paintings, drawings, and prints by some of the world’s most significant artists who came to Florida from 1823 to 1950 to capture the “Sunshine State.”

This book includes works by George Cope, William Glackens, Jane Peterson, Martin Johnson Heade, Herman Herzog, Winslow Homer, George Inness, Frank Shapleigh, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Arrah Lee Gaul, and William Aiken Walker. Essays on each artist present an aesthetic, historical, social, and cultural overview designed to illuminate the significance of the works of art presented.

Featuring essays by Erik Robinson, former historian at the Museum of Florida History, Tallahassee, and the late Wendell Garrett, former editor of Antiques magazine, and Nicolai Cikovsky, former curator of American and British painting at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., this volume helps to situate individual works in Florida’s past. Their essays discuss Florida’s history, explore its society and statehood in 1845, and introduce the Vickers Collection. The new preface in this paperback edition refreshes readers on the importance of this collection. In highlighting and contextualizing these influential works, Celebrating Florida places them within the mainstream of American art.

Gary R. Libby is director emeritus of the Museum of Arts and Sciences, Daytona Beach, Florida. He has served as contributing editor to Southwest Art Magazine and International Fine Art Collector Magazine.