Like other American industrialists from Pittsburgh, including Carnegie, Frick and Mellon, William and Anna Singer used their wealth to collect art, establish museums and support artists and socially motivated projects. Between 1900 and 1940 this American couple amassed some 3,000 paintings, works on paper, sculptures and other artifacts.
The collection is now spread across four locations - the Singer Museum, Laren; Villa Dalheim in Olden Norway - where the couple lived for a time; the West-Norway Museum of Decorative Art, Bergen, and the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts - the first museum the Singers founded in 1931 in Hagerstown, Anna's American birthplace.
This is the first time a detailed scholarly study has been made of the background and collection motives of these remarkable benefactors. This publication chronicles their cosmopolitan lifestyle and gives an insight into the beginnings of the collection, which include works by Auguste Rodin, Paul Gauguin, Max Liebermann, American Impressionists like Walter Griffin, Willard Metcalf and Childe Hassam, as well as Masters from The Hague and Laren Schools. The collection also contains medieval sculptures, Italian Masters, Asian ceramics, textiles, antiques and an array of works on paper by, among others, Jean-Fran s Millet and James Whistler.