Co-editied by Shelley Perlove and George S. Keyes, Seventeenth-Century European Drawings in Midwestern Collections: The Age of Bernini, Rembrandt, and Poussin, the result of an ambitious project sponsored by the Midwest Art History Society, with additional generous support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, brings together nearly two hundred treasures of the Baroque age from museum collections throughout the Midwest. The volume presents a fascinating and representative selection of Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French drawings in Midwestern repositories, offering new insights on many of these works of art. Many are relatively unknown, and some have never before been published.

Authored by major scholars in the field, the catalogue presents each drawing along with a concise description with full scholarly apparatus. Four essays, written by Babette Bohn, George S. Keyes, Kristi A. Nelson, and Alvin L. Clark, Jr., respectively, introduce the Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French schools. The catalogue’s introductory essay, by Shelley Perlove, places these works within the historical, iconographic, and stylistic currents of seventeenth-century art. The catalogue is designed to have widespread appeal for art historians, curators, artists, collectors, students, and general readers interested in art and cultural history. Moreover, Seventeenth-Century European Drawings in Midwestern Collections highlights the surprising number of institutions throughout the Midwest that have acquired distinguished European drawings from the seventeenth century worthy of full recognition by collectors and connoisseurs.

Shelley Perlove, professor emerita of the history of art of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, specializes in Italian and Dutch art of the seventeenth century. Her scholarly interests include art and religious culture in early modern Europe, the Hebrew Bible, material culture, and the visual arts, and visual typology in sixteenth-century art. She is the author of two award-winning books published by Penn State University Press: Bernini and the Idealization of Death, and more recently with Larry Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age. She has written more than thirty articles, essays and reviews appearing in such journals as Burlington Magazine, Gazette des Beaux Arts, and Artibus et Historiae and has curated five exhibitions devoted to early modern prints. Most recently she served as consultant to the exhibition, “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus,” which opened at the Louvre. Her current book project investigates the religious works of Rembrandt’s Dutch followers.