Edward S. Cooke Jr. Knihy

A tribute to a major collection and its founder, this beautiful book illuminates life in colonial AmericaThis book showcases highlights from the Dietrich American Foundation, established in 1963 by H. Richard Dietrich Jr. and focused on 18th-century American fine and decorative arts. Essays explore the formation of the collection and its many areas of strength, enhancing current understandings of colonial history and material culture. The volume’s coeditor, H. Richard Dietrich III, unfolds an American story of a family’s entrepreneurship and speaks to his father’s varied yet interconnected collecting interests, as well as the common threads that unified them. An array of specialists explore the scope and uncommon richness of the foundation’s holdings, of which books and manuscripts account for half. Chinese export wares, furniture, silver, fraktur, and other decorative arts, and paintings of historical importance speak in varied ways to the nature of colonial identity, while objects related to the whaling trade signal the new nation’s maritime focus. With striking new photography and insightful scholarship, In Pursuit of History brings to life both the collector and the time period that he loved.Distributed for the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Dietrich American Foundation

"Several years ago, 26 prominent studio furniture-makers were asked to design works of furniture based on period pieces in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The result is an explosion of form and fantasy in which past and present are mergedUa celebration of the continued existence of small-scale furniture making in the midst of mass production. Among the works discussed in this lavishly illustrated book are pieces by Garry Knox Bennett, JohnCederquist, Kristina Madsen, Judy Kensley McKie, Michael Pierschalla, and Paul Sasso. In an insightful and detailed essay, author Edward Cooke Jr. contextualizes these works, outlining their complex relationship with American traditions of furniture design."