At the heart of this beautiful volume is a remarkable collection of paintings amassed in the late 1980s by Texans Hugh and Marie Halff. The works range from Ernest Lawson’s celebration of modern urbanism in his Flatiron Building (1906-07), to the exoticism of Harry Siddons Mowbray’s Two Women (1893-96), and the harmonious plein-air geometry of Theodore Robinson’s The Anchorage,Cos Cob(1894). The Halff’s collection spans the period in American art known as ‘The Gilded Age’, when Ruskin’s credo of ‘truth to nature’ gave way to Whistler’s rallying cry of ‘art for art’s sake’.