Drama & Beauty

Bob Jones Jr. founded his art collection as an educational effort and opened it on the campus of the university named after his father in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1951. Those first 25 paintings included works by Bicci di Lorenzo, Luca Giordano, El Greco and Tintoretto, and today the collection comprises over 400 paintings, as well as a wide range of sculpture, decorative arts and antiquities. It is widely recognised among scholars as one of the finest collections of Renaissance and Baroque paintings in America, and a document of the revival of the taste for Baroque pictures in the mid-20th century.

Erin Jones’s introduction provides an overview of the history of the various iterations of the Museum & Gallery, even as it looks forward to a new home in the centre of its community. Richard P. Townsend’s essay presents the most in-depth examination to date of Bob Jones Jr. as a collector, extensively using letters, invoices and photographs to paint a picture of Jones hitherto not available. At the heart of the volume is the presentation of 55 paintings, featuring works by great European masters including Botticelli, Bouts, Cranach, Guercino, Jordaens, Preti, Reni, Ribera, Rubens, Tiepolo and Zurbarán.

Author biographies

Erin Rodman Jones is executive director, Museum & Gallery, Inc

Richard P. Townsend is an independent scholar and president of Townsend Art Advisory LLC

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Bob Jones
• Introduction by Erin Rodman Jones
• The Collector behind the Pictures: Bob Jones Jr. and Old Master Paintings in America by Richard P. Townsend
• Catalogue: Italian; Spanish; Flemish and German; Dutch; French; The Nineteenth Century
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index