Featuring 65 masterworks from the collection of one of the world’s pre-eminent art museums, European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York spans 500 years of European art and artists, from a time when creativity was closely controlled by the church and state to a period in which our contemporary idea of the creatively independent artist was born. Commencing in the 1420s, with an early Renaissance panel painting, and concluding in the early twentieth century, at the height of the post-impressionist movement, these highly acclaimed works represent the key artistic breakthroughs and innovations in painting that set the course of Western and much global art to the present day.

In this full-colour hardback edition produced to accompany the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art exhibition of the same name, Katharine Baetjer, Curator Emerita in the Department of European Paintings, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Chris Saines CNZM, Director of QAGOMA, provide scholarly context for high-quality reproductions of magisterial works including Titian’s poetic Venus and Adonis of the 1550s; Caravaggio’s allegoric Musicians of c.1595; Rembrandt’s painterly Flora of c.1654; and Vermeer’s elaborate Allegory of the Catholic Faith of c.1670-72, together with a group of outstanding nineteenth-century paintings by Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh.

European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York is the perfect primer to European art of the period, serving to introduce readers to the greatest painters of the times and explaining their influence on the course of art history, and will be of great interest to a general audience as well as connoisseurs of international art history.