Douglas Cooper, Great Family Collections
Cooper, Douglas. Great Family Collections. First Edition. 1965. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition.
This large and well-produced book was a sequel to Cooper’s 1963 opus Great Private Collections. In this volume, he focuses on twelve remarkable collections, amassed over centuries and generations, a three dimensional representation of a particular family’s life story. The names profiled here are familiar—Cavendish, Spencer, Harrach, Pallavincini, Fürstenberg, Alba, and de Condé. This book was written in era when inheritance of familial estates was heavily taxed, and one of Cooper’s intentions was to demonstrate that private ownership is critical for the preservation of art. The book is well illustrated, with nearly fifty pages in full color.
“Collecting is an outward expression of incentives of many (and often conflicting kinds), because among them we must reckon with creativity, curiosity, self-instruction, concupiscence, self-glorification, or the promotion of culture and learning.”
--Douglas Cooper