This book explores why and how some of America’s greatest art collectors, including Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Clay Frick, Charles Deering, Archer Huntington, William Randolph Hearst, and Algur Meadows turned to the art of Spain to expand and enrich their collections. The authors examine in lively detail the formation of the taste for Spanish art that grew from travel and visits to world fairs as well as the roles played by contemporary artists, dealers and advisors who were so influential in importing Spanish works of art to the United States to fuel the growth of so many private and later public American collections.

Inge Reist holds a doctorate from the University of Columbia, where she taught for several years, and is director emerita of the Center for the History of Collecting of the Frick Art Reference Library. She has also directed the photographic archives of the Frick Collection and has been president of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History. She is an expert in the history of collecting, on which she has published papers and given lectures at many museums and conferences. She has coedited Provenance: An Alternative Art History (2012) with Gail Feigenbaum, though she remains interested in other fields, as evidenced by “All the World’s a Stage: The Theater Conceit in Early Modern Italy” for the Blackwell Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art (2012). Her essays on the history of collecting include “The Fate of the Palais-Royal Collection, 1791–1800” in The Circulation of Works of Art in the Revolutionary Era 1789–1848 (2006); “Sacred Art in the Profane New World of Nineteenth-Century America” in Sacred Possessions: Collecting Italian Religious Art, 1500 to 1900 (2011); and “Helen Clay Frick, Charting Her Own Course” in Power Underestimated: American Women Art Collectors (2011).

José Luis Colomer holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Bologna and a degree in Art History from the Sorbonne. He currently directs the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica and the Center for Spain in America. His research addresses cultural relations between Spain and Italy in the seventeenth century through diplomatic agents and the exchange of gifts of artworks between the European courts and Spanish kings and queens, as well as Velázquez’s second journey to Rome and his connections with prominent Italians at the court of Madrid.