Sargent to Freud/De Sargent a Freud: Modern British Paintings and Drawings in the Beaverbrook Collection

by Richard Shone, Ian G. Lumsden

English, French

212 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1998

About the author

Richard Shone (born 1949) is a British art historian and art critic specializing in British modern art, and from 2003–15 was the editor of The Burlington Magazine.

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lord Beaverbrook made his home in New Brunswick and decided he wanted to create an art museum as his legacy. Fredericton's Beaverbrook Gallery is that legacy and of course I visited, when I was living there. They didn't have a museum catalogue, which was disappointing. The nearest I could find was this book, which is limited in scope, as the title suggests.

Beaverbrook was opposed to abstract art and refused to buy any for the proposed gallery, but was otherwise happy to collect work by contemporary artists, hence most of the work here is from the 1st half of the 20th Century.

The book itself has parallel English and French text (a legal requirement) which has been allowed to mar the design; more area is given to explanatory text than to picture reproduction! Text should have been confined to the left pages and the right pages given over entirely to the reproductions. The consequent shortening of the text would do no harm, in my view.