GREAT PRIVATE COLLECTIONS OF IMPERIAL RUSSIA

Families like the Stroganovs or Tretyakovs may be vaguely familiar to U.S. readers, but most of the 30 clans and individuals that did the bulk of Russia's collecting over three centuries will not—making this book all the more valuable. Matching masterworks with the rich travelers to Europe (where most pieces originated) who recognized them and brought them back, most often, to Petersburg, Neverov, a curator at Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum, shows how that institution, along with the Pushkin in Moscow and various others, came to hold so much great art. Jacques-Louis David, Greuze, Gainsborough, van Eyck, Memling, Matisse (Dance ), Tiepolo, Cezanne, Picasso (the lovely Young Girl on a Ball ) and Bonnard are all here, though works by the likes of da Vinci and Titian that travelers to Russia may have seen and loved are not. The indifferent layout and font choices don't detract too much from the more than 350 full-color reproductions, which are clear if not ravishing. Neverov exhaustively relates the families he discusses to their home cities and those cities to their larger histories; as a reckoning of provenance, the book fully satisfies. (Nov.)