Herschel V. Jones: The Imprint of a Great Collector

In 1916, Herschel V. Jones, a distinguished and passionate art collector, purchased 5,600 prints from William Mead Ladd of Portland, Oregon. Jones promptly gave his newly acquired etchings, engravings, woodcuts, and lithographs to The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the museum’s distinguished Ladd and Jones collection was born.

In Herschel V. Jones, Lisa Dickinson Michaux sheds new light on the creation of this extraordinary collection. Through in-depth essays, she reveals Jones’s ambitious goals as well as his tenacity—he requested anonymity from the museum until he had “secured rare additional prints to fill in the gaps, making it a collection that represents the entire history of the graphic arts.” Eventually Jones added more than six hundred prints.

This beautifully produced volume, abounding with full-color illustrations, reproduces over one hundred of the most important and interesting prints in the Institute’s Ladd and Jones collection and paints a vivid picture of these pioneering collectors and the history of print collecting in America at the end of the nineteenth century.

Lisa Dickinson Michaux is associate curator of prints and drawings at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Distributed for The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.