Great Smaller Museums of Europe

• Witty and erudite guide to thirty five glorious yet lesser-known European museums
• Includes the Musée Marmottan in Paris, the Czartoryski Collection in Krakow and London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery

This lively personal tour takes the reader on a fascinating exploration of thirty-five of Europe’s greatest small museums. None of them are a national collection, but each is glorious in its own way and houses some of the world’s greatest art treasures. Most art lovers will be familiar with some of these collections; very few will know them all. From the Musée Marmottan in Paris to the Czartoryski Collection in Krakow, and Denmark’s Louisiana Museum in Humleboek to London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, little-known treasure houses are uncovered alongside fresh evaluations of those that are better known. Arranged by country, the text is written with great wit and erudition, describing collections that are royal and aristocratic, patrician and bourgeois, academic and university, artists’ houses and museums or twentieth-century foundations.

James Stourton was Chairman of Sotheby’s UK. He read History of Art at Cambridge and joined Sotheby’s in 1979. He is the author of Great Collectors of Our Time and frequently writes on the history of collecting. He has written on the subject for Apollo, The Art Newspaper, Matrix, The Independent and The Spectator and regularly lectures to the National Art Collections Fund, Sotheby’s Institute of Education and Cambridge University faculty of Art History.