Parts of the book are devoted to artists such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent and the Ashcan School; others to movers-and-shakers like the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, the sculptor and museum-founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the photographer and champion of modernism Alfred Stieglitz, and Alfred H. Barr Jr., the inimitable founding director of MOMA.