by Tatsiana Zhurauliova
According to his recollections, Henry Pearlman became an art collector when he first saw Chaïm Soutine’s painting View of Ceret (c.1921-22) in the windows of the American Art Association–Anderson Galleries in New York (later Parke-Bernet). He purchased the painting in 1945, thus starting what would become one of the finest private collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in the United States. At the time Pearlman already owned a number of early Italian, French, and American genre paintings, but none of them elicited the same passionate response as the Soutine. The canvas, he stated, set him “on a road of adventure both exhilarating and satisfying.” Over the years, he collected over seventy masterpieces of modern art, including works by Paul Cézanne, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas , Paul Gauguin , Amedeo Modigliani, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Vincent van Gogh .
