A Marble Quarry: The James H. Ricau Collection of American Sculpture at the Chrysler Museum of Art

James H. Ricau, an individual of great vision and taste, if limited financial means, was one of this country's most serious collectors of sculpture, and ultimately owned one of the largest and most important collections of nineteenth-century American marble statuary ever assembled. It was eventually acquired by the Chrysler Museum of Norfolk, Virginia, and this comprehensive volume coincides with the opening there of a special gallery devoted to these seventy neoclassical masterworks.

Especially rich in works by Hiram Powers, Chauncey B. Ives, Joseph Mozier, William Henry Rinehart, Thomas Crawford, and Randolph Rogers, it also includes examples by George Grey Barnard, Harriet Hosmer, Frederick MacMonnies, Larkin Mead, Erastus Dow Palmer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Emma Stebbins, William Wetmore Story, and others - thirty artists in all. A biography is provided for each artist; each sculpture is thoroughly documented and illustrated in full color.

There are also alternate views and details of the major pieces, as well as fascinating photographs taken by Ricau himself showing the sculptures as they were installed in the magnificent Greek revival temple-front home he bought in Piermont, New York, in 1958, a Northern version of the plantations of his early years in Louisiana and a setting that was essential to his vision of the collection.