Digital Editor Pac Pobric looks to Hubert de Givenchy, the famed fashion designer who died this week.

François Boucher (1703–1770), the friend and protégé of Mme de Pompadour, was the greatest French artist and decorator of the Rococo period. His prolific oeuvre has been both lauded and derided, but it is not until now—in this volume accompanying an exhibition held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Detroit Institute of Arts—that his art has been fully studied and appreciated. Alastair Laing, the principal author of this volume, shows that Boucher's work represents the acme of French eighteenth-century fine and decorative arts. With the exception of a trip to Italy in his mid-twenties to study the work of Renaissance masters, Boucher lived and worked in Paris. His artistic progression, through religious themes, mythological subjects, genre painting, landscape, and portraiture, is thoroughly documented in this catalogue. The patronage of Mme de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, ensured a large demand for Boucher's work, including drawings, prints and paintings, as well as tapestry and porcelain designs. His art traveled throughout northern Europe, and formed the essence of the French Rococo style sought after by patrons and emulated by artists in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Saint Petersburg, and Munich. A large collection of these works is illustrated in this volume. In addition, little-known or misattributed early works have been brought to light, showing Boucher's first experiments with composition and color. His designs reproduced in tapestry at Beauvais and Gobelins, and in porcelain at Vincennes and Sèvres, are illuminated in lively discussions by Edith Standen, Consultant, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and by Antoinette Fay-Halle, Conservateur, Musée Nationale de Céramique, Sèvres, and Conservateur, Musée Nationale Adrien-Dubouché, Limoges. Preliminary essays by Alastair Laing, Pierre Rosenberg, Conservateur-en-chef, Département des peintures, Musée du Louvre, and J. Patrice Marandel, Curator, European Paintings, The Detroit Institute of Arts, provide the necessary foundation for a complete appreciation of the artist's work. Augmented by a detailed chronology and bibliography, this volume comprehensively defines a painter of extraordinary productivity, diversity, and influence. It gives the reader a chance to examine with fresh eyes the range of styles and subject matter of an artist who epitomizes the splendid taste of his time—François Boucher.

This is the eighth exhibition in the series meant to show the complete holdings of old and more recent master drawings in the Robert Lehman Collection. The sixty-three drawings and watercolors included here represent almost every major master of twentieth-century French art as well as some lesser-known artists of the period. A large group of watercolors by Paul Signac and some of his early drawings comprise an interesting and important section of the exhibition. Jacques Villon's draftsmanship is also well documented by a sizable assembly of his early illustrations as well as later drawings. Other painters, like Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Suzanne Valadon, Albert Marquet, and Maurice de Vlaminck, are also represented by outstanding drawings, many of which have never been exhibited before. An interesting facet of this exhibition is that the Robert Lehman Collection contains important paintings by most of these artists; many of the paintings are on permanent exhibition in the paintings galleries of the Collection.

The Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses one of the finest collections of frames in the world. Robert Lehman's interest in picture frames set him apart from other collectors of his era. The collection he bequeathed to the Museum includes nearly four hundred frames, most of them Italian and French and dating from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Although he bought most of these frames to display his paintings and drawings, a number of them could only have been acquired as works of art in their own right. Like nearly all other European frames, the ones Robert Lehman collected have now been taken entirely out of context, the exception being the engaged moldings on early Italian panels. Most of the Italian frames, both the engaged moldings and the small cassette and astragal frames they inspired, probably hung in palazzi; the finest of the French frames were originally displayed amongst the gilt furniture and heavy fabrics that decorated luxurious northern European rooms. Using the documentary evidence that survives and his wide knowledge of comparable examples, Timothy Newbery has attempted to place these frames on the pictures and in the interiors for which they were intended. For each frame he has provided a profile drawing that is a key to its design, origin, date, and application. Newbery, a frame historian and frame maker who lives in London, is one of the world's few experts on the subject of frames. His scholarship represents the state of the art in this still relatively narrow field. The volume includes a glossary, a bibliography, and an index.

The miniatures and cuttings from medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the Robert Lehman Collection represent the major schools of illumination that flourished in Europe from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Robert Lehman must have considered illuminations above all an extension of his great collection of Italian, French, German, and Netherlandish paintings. In a broader sense, they manifested one more facet of the interest in early European art that led him also to collect exceptional Netherlandish and German drawings of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Among the small but choice selection of illuminations catalogued here are a leaf painted for the Hours of Étienne Chevalier by Jean Fouquet, the most celebrated French painter of the fifteenth century; a miniature by the "prince d'enluminure," Simon Marmion, painted for a Breviary for Charles the Bold and Margaret of York; and, among the Italian cuttings, a Last Judgment in an Initial C by the great Florentine painter Lorenzo Monaco and an Adoration of the Magi by Francesco Marmitta that is accompanied by a letter attesting to its sixteenth-century papal provenance. A Self-portrait by Simon Bening and a Virgin and Child signed by Francesco Morone are early instances of small paintings on parchment conceived as independent works of art rather than illustrations for manuscripts. A miniature Holy Face by Gerard David may have been meant as an independent devotional image, or it could as easily have illuminated a book. A biography of each artist and copious illustrations supplement the extensive catalogue entries, which place each of the illuminations in an art historical context that is as specific as possible.

Robert Lehman assembled the finest and most comprehensive private collection of Italian Renaissance majolica in the United States. In this volume the distinguished scholar Jörg Rasmussen catalogues the 157 majolica objects which since 1975 have been housed, along with more than 2,000 other works of art acquired by Robert Lehman and his father, Philip Lehman, in the Robert Lehman Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The brilliantly colored jars, jugs, and dishes collected by Robert Lehman document the history of Italian majolica from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the 1600s. The collection is most renowned for a magnificent group of pieces produced in the main Italian pottery centers during the High Renaissance, the golden age of majolica. The precious lusterware that was the specialty of Deruta and Gubbio, in central Italy, accounts for more than a third of the collection. Also splendidly represented are the neighboring towns of Castel Durante and Urbino, whose wares perhaps best exemplify the beauty and diversity of majolica of the early sixteenth century. One of the most extraordinary of these pieces from the Duchy of Urbino is the bowl presented to Pope Julius II in 1508, which Rasmussen calls "one of the most beautiful pieces of majolica ever made." Other istoriato, or "story-painted," wares were part of large ensembles commissioned by illustrious patrons: three plates belong to the famous Pucci service painted by Francesco Xanto Avelli da Rovigo; two others, by the master majolica painter Nicolo da Urbino, are from the set owned by Isabella d'Este, marchesa of Mantua; and there are pieces bearing the arms of the Orsini of Rome, the Salviati of Florence, and Constable Anne de Montmorency. The late Jörg Rasmussen was curator at the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg until 1979, when he was named second director of the Zentralinstitut in Munich. His complete catalogue of the Italian majolica in the Hamburg museum appeared in 1984, and he published widely on majolica as well as on sculpture and the applied arts. His text not only analyzes and classifies the majolica in the Robert Lehman Collection, providing provenances, bibliographies, and exhibition histories, but also offers glimpses of the intellectual and cultural world to which it belonged.

Robert Lehman and his father, Philip Lehman, purchased textiles with the same well-trained eyes they used to acquire paintings, drawings, and decorative arts in general. This volume catalogues the more than 250 textiles and objects made of fabric that were part of Robert Lehman's bequest to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1975. Many of these textiles were used as hangings, covers, or upholstery to embellish the Lehmans' elegant town house in Manhattan. They represent sixty-five years of assembling, owning, and living with historic fabrics on a day-to-day basis, and for scholars and laymen alike they document an American style of living and interior decoration that has largely disappeared. Among the most distinguished and historically significant objects in the Robert Lehman Collection are four large tapestries, including the Last Supper after Bernaert van Orley that is arguably the finest Renaissance tapestry in an American collection, and two series of embroidered roundels from fifteenth-century Flanders that illustrate episodes from the lives of Saint Martin and Saint Catherine of Alexandria. The Collection also includes a great number of ecclesiastical vestments and panels of magnificent silks and velvets in a vast array of techniques and styles that span six centuries. Christa C. Mayer Thurman, one of the foremost authorities in the field, is the Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles and Textiles Conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her thorough analysis of the Lehman holdings makes a significant contribution to scholarship in European textiles. A number of comparative illustrations supplement the catalogue entries, and the volume includes a glossary, a bibliography, and an index.

The first volume of the comprehensive catalogue of the Robert Lehman Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art is justifiably devoted to Early Italian paintings, which were particularly close to Robert Lehman's heart. In 1975, the Metropolitan Museum opened the Lehman Wing to house this magnificent collection, which had been transferred to the Museum by the Robert Lehman Foundation. It is especially appropriate that the distinguished art historian Sir John Pope-Hennessy is the author of this volume. An expert in the field of Italian paintings, he discusses in great detail the 112 works presented here; they are from many cities and regions of Italy—Siena, Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice, Umbria, Lombardy, Emilia, and the Marches, among others—and span six centuries. The earliest painting in this volume is an Umbrian work, a panel that once formed part of a thirteenth-century altarpiece. Twenty paintings come from fourteenth-century Siena, among them Madonnas by the Master of Monte Oliveto, Simone Martini, and Ugolino da Siena. Thirteen Florentine paintings are from the same century. Bernardo Daddi and his workshop and followers are represented, as well as Jacopo di Cione, Spinello Aretino, and others. From fifteenth-century Siena comes an incomparable group of twenty-seven paintings; eleven are by Giovanni di Paolo, including his famous Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, and seven are by Sano di Pietro. From Florence come works by Lorenzo Monaco, Bicci di Lorenzo, Cosimo Rosselli, and other artists. The Annunciation by Botticelli is one of the jewels of the Lehman Collection. The Venetian paintings include two well-known portraits by Jacometto and a celebrated Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini. Forty-five works are reproduced in color, the rest in duotone; in addition, there are ninety-seven comparative illustrations.

Early European art was a consuming interest of both Robert Lehman and his father, Philip Lehman, an interest reflected in the remarkable number and quality of drawings they owned from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In addition to an important group of early German drawings, the collection includes a "Saint Paul" from a series associated with Jan van Eyck and the famous "Scupstoel" from the circle of Rogier van der Weyden, the only design for a decorative sculpture to survive from the fifteenth century. The great artists of the seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens, Claude Lorrain, and Rembrandt among them, are also represented, Rembrandt by seven drawings, including the large study of Leonardo's "Last Supper" that would stay in his mind all through his career. Drawings by Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Thomas Gainsborough, Paul Sandby, and George Romney are among the many from eighteenth-century France and England. The volume discusses all 153 drawings at length, placing each in its art historical setting and complementing the discussion with comparative illustrations of related works.