The Clark: Selections from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, published in honor of this unique museum's fortieth anniversary, features eighty-four masterpieces in color, each with an accompanying essay, representing all its curatorial departments: paintings and sculpture, drawings and prints, decorative arts, and illustrated books.

The Clark begins with an early-fourteenth-century altarpiece by Ugolino da Siena and Renaissance works by Piero della Francesca, Hans Memling, and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Later works include canvases by Claude, Gainsborough, Fragonard, Goya, Turner, and Corot; beloved academic masterpieces by Stevens, Gerome, Bouguereau, Alma-Tadema, and Tissot; and works on paper by Durer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Munch, and Picasso.

Among the highlights of seven centuries of Western art are the Clark's world-renowned concentrations of French impressionism (Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec), American nineteenth-century art (Cassatt, Homer, Remington, Sargent), and English and American (Paul Revere II) seventeenth- and eighteenth-century silver.