Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design: 1826-1925

Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design is the first installment of a fully illustrated two-volume catalogue of the Academy's priceless collection of paintings and sculptures. This publication documents objects by artists elected to membership in the Academy before 1926; those created by members elected after 1925 will appear in volume two. Information on a total of 1,390 objects and biographies of 581 artists - all but twenty-four of whom were American - are found here. Works documented and illustrated cover the entire range of popular artistic subject matter: portraits, landscapes, genre works, figural objects, still lifes, images of animals, and paintings or sculptures with historical, religious, and mythological themes.
Today, after more than 175 years of collecting, the Academy owns in excess of 2,100 paintings, almost three hundred sculptures, several thousand prints, drawings, and watercolors, and a group of architectural drawings, photographs, and portfolios. The collection is especially rich in masterworks of the Hudson River School, with canvases by Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and John Frederick Kensett; portraits of artists, including Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Cecilia Beaux, and Thomas Eakins; late nineteenth-century American sculpture, with bronzes by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, Anna Hyatt Huntington, and Paul Manship; and paintings by the American Impressionists and Tonalists such as George Inness, Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, and Frederick Frieseke. These and hundreds of other masterworks of American art are documented in this volume.