Layton’s Legacy: A Historic American Art Collection, 1888–2013 - Hardcover

Eastberg, John C.; Vogel, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0982381018 ISBN 13: 9780982381014

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

Synopsis

Frederick Layton (1827–1919) was among the very first art collectors in America to fund a purpose-built civic art gallery for the public's use and enjoyment. Second only to the 1874 Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the 1888 Layton Art Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, presented a new model for the single-patron art museum in America, one significantly different from the established museums of Boston and New York. Frederick Layton and his British architect George Audsley developed a new vision for a more intimate art museum experience. They drew upon their knowledge of English precedents to create a refined, single-story, top-lit, urban gallery that would influence the development of the American art museum well into the twentieth century.
    Layton's Legacy draws on a recently discovered archive of Layton family papers, travel journals, and vintage photographs and on five years of extensive archival research in the United States and Great Britain. John C. Eastberg traces the trajectory of the collection's development from its English origins through its grand European acquisitions, Gilded Age art auctions in New York, Progressive-era renovations, postwar deaccessions, and demolition of the original gallery, all leading to a new era of curatorial innovation and major American art acquisitions at the end of the twentieth century. Eric Vogel looks more closely at the architectural history of the original Layton Art Gallery and its influence on the continuing lineage of the single-patron art museum.
    Layton's Legacy also includes the first fully illustrated documentation of the entire 125-year history of the Layton Art Collection, demonstrating its formative place in the development of the American art museum. It includes object entries from more than twenty scholars of American and European painting, furniture, and decorative art and features the works of artists Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Frederick Church, Thomas Cole, Bastien Lepage, William Bourguereau, James Tissot, Frederic Leighton, and Alma Tadema, among many others. Eminent scholars of nineteenth-century art, Dianne Macleod and Giles Waterfield, contribute forewords.

Gold Medal, Best Nonfiction, Independent Publisher Book Awards

About this title

About the Author:

John C. Eastberg is an author and historian with expertise in nineteenth-century American history and a special interest in art and architecture of the Gilded Age. He received a BA in American history from Cardinal Stritch University and an MA in American history from Marquette University. He is the author of The Captain Frederick Pabst Mansion: An Illustrated History. Eastberg is the senior historian and director of development at the Captain Frederick Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Eric Vogel is a professor of architecture and design and an architectural historian living in Milwaukee. He has a BA in art and architectural history from Harvard University and an MA in architecture from SCI-Arc. He is currently chair of the 3D Design Department at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.  

Review:

"The Layton Art Gallery and its founder Frederick Layton provide the missing link between the design and collecting policies of the early British art gallery and the nineteenth-century single-patron art museum in America."—Giles Waterfield, Courtauld Institute of Art

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0982381018
• ISBN 13: 9780982381014
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480