Sutton P. Northern European Paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1990. — 418 p.In the entry on the Philadelphia Museum of Art in his book Guide to Dutch Art in America, published in 1986 by the Netherlands-America Amity Trust, Peter C. Sutton refers to the vast holdings of Dutch paintings housed in this Museum as "a connoisseur's dream and a cataloguer's nightmare."Fortunately, as both connoisseur and cataloguer of uncommon discernment and diligence, he has himself now provided readers of this
volume with ample evidence for their enjoyment of a remarkable range of pictures, from Steen to Mauve, and from Van den Eeckhout to Van Gogh.
With the appearance of this catalogue, a second and substantial section of the European paintings collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art is
published in depth, following Richard Dorment's volume on British Painting, which was issued in 1986. As part of an ongoing program to publish important strengths of the Museum, this book also owes much to the generosity of the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency,
and The Getty Grant Program, which provided handsome grants for its realization. The preparation of the manuscript at the Museum was
supported by an endowment for scholarly publications established by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and matched by CIGNA
Foundation.
Peter C. Sutton, now the Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of European Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, began his work on this project in 1979, when he was Assistant (later Associate) Curator of European Painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His devotion to the art of the seventeenth-century Netherlands has been richly demonstrated by a pair of exhibitions he organized in 1984 and 1987: the first, assembling masterpieces of Dutch genre painting for this Museum, the Roval Academy of Arts, London, and the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz at Berlin-Dahlem; and the second, celebrating Dutch landscape painting, which traveled from Amsterdam to Boston to Philadelphia. This Museum has
particular reason to be grateful not only to his scholarship, enthusiasm, and persistence, but also to his patience, which combined to produce this
impressive catalogue eleven years after he was encouraged to launch his research.