Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) Major Catalogs about the Collection

It has been a persistent desire of The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Maryland Institute to make the unique Lucas Collection accessible to the public and to scholars. Assembled in Paris by George Aloysius Lucas between 1857 and his death there in 1909, it includes 419 oil paintings, water colors, drawings and small bronzes, almost all by French artist-contemporaries of Lucas, and, in addition, comprises about 15,000 prints and a group of palettes likewise by artists of the nineteenth century.

Those familiar with the exhibition programs at The Baltimore Museum of Art know how integral a role the George A. Lucas Collection of paintings, sculpture, and prints plays in providing a resource for many exhibitions on a variety of subject. The Lucas Collection has been on indefinite loan to the Museum from The Maryland Institute, College of Art, since 1933. In 1965, a catalogue of the paintings and sculpture was published by the Museum. The extraordinary print section, comprised of over 15,000 prints, has only recently been subjected to the arduous task of detailed cataloguing and conservation. The present exhibition celebrates the completion of the cataloging project by displaying an overview of the prints in the Lucas Collection.

With biographical sketches of some of the collectors.

In 1857 George A. Lucas, a young Baltimorean, fluent in French and enamored of French art, arrived in Paris. There he established an extensive personal network of celebrated artists and art dealers, becoming the quintessential French connection for American collectors. The most remarkable thing about Lucas was not the art that he acquired for his clients (who included William and Henry Walters, the founders of the Walters Art Museum, and John Taylor Johnston, the founding president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) but the massive collection of 18,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and etchings, as well as 1,500 books, journals, and other sources about French artists, that he acquired for himself. paintings by Cabanel, Corot, and Daubigny, prints by Whistler, Manet, and Cassatt, and portfolios of information about hundreds of French artists filled his apartment and spilled into the adjacent flat of his mistress. Based on Lucas' notes and diaries as well as thousands of other archival documents, the author tells the fascinating story of how Lucas brought together the most celebrated French artists with the most prominent and wealthy American collectors of the time. it also details how, nearing the end of his life, Lucas struggled to find a future home for his collection, eventually giving it to Baltimore's Maryland Institute. Without the means to care for the collection, the Institute loaned it to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where most of the art was placed in storage and disappeared from public view. but in 1990, when the Institute proposed to auction or otherwise sell the collection, it rose from obscurity, reached new glory as an irreplaceable cultural treasure, and became the subject of an epic battle fought in and out of court that captivated public attention and enflamed the passions of art lovers and museum officials across the nation.