The Gilbert Collection of Gold and Silver

English text.; Hardcover (with dust jacket).; 24.5 x 29 cm.; 3.3 kg.; 688 pages with colour and black and white and illustrations.; Used with signs of wear on the exterior and interior. The dust jacket shows minor edge wear, scuffs and scratches on the front cover, spine and back cover. Signs of wear on the interior, namely signs of a sticker removed at the bottom of the front free endpaper and pen written signature and dedication on second page. Remaining interior in very good condition.; INCLUDES TWO LOOSE LEAFLETS WITH RECENT ACQUISIONS FROM 1988 AND 1991.;"Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert's commitment to goldsmith's work and their magnificent collection has greatly enriched the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Gilbert Collection of gold and silver, a substantial part of which has already been given to the museum, is unique in its range and quality. It is to honor this collection and to make it more widely accessible to the public that the museum has undertaken to publish this catalogue, which documents the scope of the collection and the Gilberts' devotion to it. Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the collection is the rate at which it has grown. In his preface to William Ezelle Jones's Monumental Silver: Selections from the Gilbert Collection of 1977, the late Kenneth Donahue, then director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was not guilty of exaggeration when he described it as "the richest private collection of Georgian silver. in America." At that stage the collection was less than ten years old and numbered forty-four major items, concentrating mainly on works of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English masters Paul de Lamerie and Paul Storr. Ten years later the collection has grown to more than 175 pieces and may now, with equal justice, be described as the most distinguished collection of its kind, public or private, in the United States, rivaling even the great courtly collections of Europe. Its range has expanded during this period to include English and Continental goldsmith's work from the Renaissance to the Victorian era, and the chronology of Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert's acquisitions reveals a steadily increasing catholicity of taste and a growing interest in great rarities. No collector who is so ambitious as to choose a field as wide as this could ever hope to assemble a collection through which the history of the subject could be adequately studied. The Gilbert Collection, however, although noticeably stronger in some periods than in others, has come closer to this goal than perhaps any other extant private collection, an indication of the energy with which the Gilberts have pursued their aim." excerpt from the preface by Earl A. Powell III, Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.…