The Cloisters: The building and the collection of Medieval art in Fort Tryon Park

New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1946. Trade Paperback. Very Good. 121 Pages. Brown covers with minor stains and edge wear. Penciled owner's name on front endpaper. There are 61 black and black and photographic illustrations of the collection. Text descriptions of the exhibitions is included. Maps of France and Spain. In 1925 John D. Rockefeller, Jr., presented to The Metropolitan Museum of Art a sum of money with which to purchase and maintain the collection of mediaeval sculpture and architectural material assembled by George Grey Barnard and since 1914 open to the public in a brick structure built especially for it on Fort Washington Avenue. The Barnard collection was perhaps the most extensive of its kind in America at that time. Large sections of the cloisters of the long abandoned and ruined monasteries of Saint-Michelde-Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem-Ie-Desert, Bonnefont-en-Comminges, and Trie formed the nucleus of this collection. The exhibition of additional gifts left the original structure wholly inadequate. Therefore, when in June, 1930, he presented to the City the high land overlooking the Hudson which is now Fort Tryon Park, he reserved the northern hilltop for a new and larger Cloisters museum. Throughout the period of actual construction, which began in 1934, Mr. Collens and Mr. Rorimer were in intimate co-operation with Mr. Rockefeller and together directed the construction of the building. To them the credit for the present (1946) form of The Cloisters is due. The subject of this book is the building and the collection of the medieval art for the Fort Tryon Park museum.