Alfred Baur. Pioneer and Collector

The Fondation Baur, Musée des Arts d Extrême-Orient, Geneva, Switzerland, houses one of the most important collections of Asian art in the world: some 9,000 works from China and Japan. This new book celebrates the 50th anniversary of the museum and the 150th birthday of Alfred Baur (1865-1951), whose collections are housed in the museum’s elegant nineteenth-century townhouse. Lavishly illustrated with stunning new photographs, most full page, the book showcases the diversity and quality of Baur’s collections, which span netsuke, lacquerware, saber fittings, prints, jades, imperial ceramics, textiles, and much more. Precious Japanese objects, meticulously worked and technically perfect, reveal the outstanding skills of Japanese craftsmen; the simplicity of the forms of Chinese monochrome ceramics displays the contemporaneity of the visionary master ceramists of the Song dynasty.