The American art collection assembled by Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd during the 1960s and 1970s constitutes one of the great private collections of historic American painting. This book examines the collection in depth, focusing on 140 works donated to The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in the years since 1979.

The works reproduced include examples from America's foremost realist masters. Among them are portraits by John Singleton Copley and Charles Willson Peale; landscapes by Thomas Cole, Frederic E.

Church, and Martin Johnson Heade; George Caleb Bingham's extraordinary Boatmen on the Missouri; one of Edward Hick's most ambitious treatments of The Peaceable Kingdom; watercolors, drawings, and an early Civil War oil by Winslow Homer; and works by Eastman Johnson, Thomas Anshutz, John Frederick Peto, Grant Wood, Charles Sheeler, and Andrew Wyeth.

Each work is reproduced here in full color. The accompanying texts, comprised of extracts from contemporary accounts by artists, critics, patrons, and sitters, are lively and illuminating guides to understanding each work's history and significance. A detailed history of ownership and public exhibition and a selected bibliography are also provided for each painting. In many cases, this is the first time these important materials have appeared in print.

The fascinating introductory essay examines the context of the Rockefellers' collecting, the directions they considered in forming the collection, their increasing sense of responsibility toward it, and factors they considered in its disposition.