Beatrice Greenough, of the prominent Newport family, worked at the Redwood as a librarian, and in 1962 donated her family collection of largely French and Italian seventeenth and eighteenth illustrated books first amassed by her grandfather, the francophile Beaux-Arts architect Whitney Warren.
Comprising over 200 titles of the rarest illustrated festival books, custom limited editions, and bound suites of high-art engravings, many of noble and Royal patronage, the Greenough Collection restages what had first been theorized in the early 18c literature on print collecting: that is, what constitutes the proper, ‘socially purposeful’ collection of high-art prints.
The book purchased above, General Idea of a Complete Collection of Prints (1771) by K.-H. von Heineken, print curator of the famed Dresden print collection, is the first substantive period source that touches on the exact topic of the proper categorization and public function of a print collection, during one of the greatest high points–the 18th century–in western printmaking and specialized book production, notably in France. Whitney Warren and the Greenoughs were of course expressing longstanding strands of American Gilded Age taste, whilst Heineken was publishing an avowal of the diplomatic usage of print collections for European heads of state during the Enlightenment.
In fact, Warren and the Greenoughs purchased rare volumes and prints by the greatest graphic masters of the classical age, the very works Heineken himself purchased from his contemporaries. The latter’s book is thus an indispensable primary source to inform research on works in the Greenough collection itself. The book is notable for its 32 engraved and woodcut plates; the Redwood copy bearing the ex libris of the noted French bibliophile Arthur Brölemann.
