David Stark

European Painting in the Tweed Museum of Art David Stark 1st edition

Art/Regional

A fiftieth anniversary guide to the museum's stunning European collection.

George P. Tweed (1871-1946) was one of the most visible leaders in Duluth's twentieth-century business and cultural world, celebrated for his impressive collection of European master paintings. Never having traveled to Europe, Tweed purchased many of his pieces at New York's finest auction houses, and perhaps received his greatest inspiration from the well-known collections of John Pierpont Morgan and Henry Clay Frick. Four years after the death of her husband, Alice Tweed donated their sizable collection to the University of Minnesota, creating the nucleus of what would become the Tweed Museum of Art at the Duluth campus.

This new catalog provides the first complete guide to the European paintings of the Tweed Museum of Art at the University of Minnesota Duluth and highlights its ninety-one most prominent works. Renaissance and baroque works such as the Caravaggesque The Scourging of Saint Blaise and Denys Calvaert's Flight into Egypt begin the collection that is perhaps at its best in its representation of nineteenth-century French works, including four works by Jean-François Millet, and others by Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, and Camille Corot. Each is described not only in relation to its subject matter and the artist's vision, but to the Tweed collection as a whole.

What emerges from this catalog is not only a memorable guide to an amazing group of paintings, but a fascinating glimpse into the process of art collection during the past century.

David Stark is senior assistant director of museum education at the Art Institute of Chicago and is an instructor at Columbia College in Chicago. Distributed for the Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota Duluth.