The most eagerly awaited set of reproductions in art-book history: more than one hundred masterpieces of modern French painting from one of the world's fabled repositories of great art - the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania - are here published in full color for the first time. These paintings are the crown jewels of the extraordinary collection assembled in the early twentieth century by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the bold and original collector who established the Foundation in 1922 as a school for the study of art and philosophy. Now, after six decades of limited access to visitors and a ban on color reproduction, the Barnes Foundation welcomes a wider audience through the publication of this magnificent volume. Manet, Renoir, Monet, Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rousseau, Soutine, La Fresnaye, Modigliani, Picasso, Braque, and Matisse - the list of artists gives only a hint of the splendors this book contains. Here are major landmarks of modern art that many know of but few have seen, including twenty-four Renoirs encompassing the entire span of his career ... thirty monumental Cezannes, including bather groups, landscapes, still lifes, and portraits ... Matisse's pivotal Bonheur de vivre, Three Sisters Triptych, and world-famous Dance mural (and eighteen other paintings and oil studies) ... the finest of van Gogh's six paintings of Joseph-Etienne Roulin ... Seurat's celebrated Models ... the Douanier Rousseau's strange, unsettling Unpleasant Surprise ... the tender portrait of young M. Loulou by Gauguin ... a spectacular cluster of seven early Picassos. And this is only a sampling of the exhilarating visual banquet offered in these pages. Great French Paintings from The Barnes Foundation is the companion volume to an unprecedented exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. To describe the paintings and relate the achievements of Dr. Barnes as a collector and an educator, commentaries and essays have been provided by a dozen notable American and French art historians and curators: Francoise Cachin, Anne Distel, and Anne Roquebert of the Musee d'Orsay; Jack Flam, Distinguished Professor of Art History. Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York; Michel Hoog of the Musee de l'Orangerie; Charles S. Moffett of the Phillips Collection; Marla Prather and Jeffrey S. Weiss of the National Gallery of Art; Joseph J. Rishel and Christopher Riopelle of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Helene Seckel of the Musee Picasso (Paris); and Richard J. Wattenmaker of the Archives of American Art. For everyone to whom the paintings in the Barnes Foundation have been a legend - unattainable - and for every devotee of great art and beautiful books, this volume will be a joy and a treasure.