This book is an anthology of my collection of paintings and sculpture, the origin of which goes back to the i98os when Heini and I were looking for a new home for the ThyssenBornemisza collection. It was at that time, with the advice and support of my husband, that I started to acquire my first paintings. lust four years later, in i992, a selection from that collection, entitled 'From Canaletto to Kandinsky', went on public display in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum to much critical acclaim. As the collection grew, it began to travel around the world and has now been the subject of almost thirty temporary public exhibitions in cities as close to home as Valencia and Zaragoza and as far away as New York and Shanghai.

This volume presents in lavish detail an exceptional selection of landscape paintings from what is almost certainly one of the world's finest private art collections - that of the Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, now housed within the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

Showcasing a wide range of paintings that includes landscapes, seascapes and townscapes dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, it is a sumptuous addition to Scala's prestigious series on the world's great art collections. This fine collection contains important examples of seventeenth-century Dutch painting and eighteenth-century artists, including Canaletto, Boucher and Guardi. The heart of the collection is its nineteenth-century art, from Caspar David Friedrich to Corot. The holdings of hnpressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings are perhaps the richest and most striking, with fine examples by

Degas, van Gogh, Monet and Renoir. Also well represented are the avant-gardes from the beginning of the last century, for example Braque and Matisse, and twentieth-century American artists, including Hopper and O' Keeffe. Each is represented in this book about the collection.

INTRODUCTION 6

FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO ROCOCO ii

VEDUTE 31

FROM ROMANTICISM TO NATURALISM 4I

IMPRESSIONISM 59

GAUGUINAND OTHER POST-IMPRESSIONISTS 77

MATISSE AND FAUVISM 89

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM ioi

AMERICAN PAINTING IN THE FIRST HALF

OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 119

INDEX 128