Durer (Dürer)

London: Spring Books. Good in Very Good- dust jacket. 1967. Hardcover. 44, (50) plates pages; Owner's signature on ffep "S.M. Alsop / Washington, 1968" Cloth faded at lower half inch edge of front board, dustjacket edgeworn and chipped. Contents clean and secure in binding. Examines the life and work of Albrecht Durer, born in 1471, and considered by many as the greatest German artist. Beautifully illustrated with 50 color full page reproductions and several b&w test illustrations. From the collection of Susan Mary Patten Alsop, a popular historian and a pillar of Washington society, was the daughter of a diplomat, a descendant of founding father John Jay and served with her first husband Bill Patten at the American Embassy in Paris in the 1950s. When her husband died in 1960, she married Joseph Alsop, the journalist, the following year. In the 1970s she embarked on her own literary career producing "To Marietta From Paris: 1945-1960" (1974), followed by "Lady Sackville: A Biography" (1978), "Yankees at the Court: The First Americans in Paris" (1982), and "The Congress Dances: Vienna 1814-1815" (1984). Her Georgetown homes (both with and without Alsop) hosted dignitaries, publishers and a variety of interesting people during the 1960s and 1970s including such luminaries as John F. Kennedy, Phil Graham, Katharine Graham, and Isaiah Berlin, earning her the nickname "the grand dame of Washington society," (to which she rather objected). .