Duveen Brothers and the market for decorative arts, 1880-1940

Includes bibliographical references and index.
"Active in London, Paris, and New York, Duveen Brothers was the most prominent art and antique dealer from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The firm's success came from buying furniture, tapestries, porcelain, and other objets d'art and selling it at high prices to wealthy Americans, including Henry Clay Frick, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Arabella Huntington, and John Pierpont Morgan. Making extensive use of Duveen Brothers records at the Getty Research Institute, as well as letters and invoices in the archives of the firm's clients, Vignon provides a rich study of this influential firm in the history of collecting. Here, for the first time, their commerce is examined through the eyes of the dealers--Joel, Henry, and Joseph Duveen--rather than the viewpoint of their clients. In doing so, Vignon traces the influential phenonmena of the exodus of antique furniture and objets d'art from Europe to the United States, and the development in America of a taste for such objects."--from book jacket