In her introduction, Bessonova, curator of Impressionist paintings at the Pushkin Museum, focuses on Muscovites Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, whose collections of French art formed the Impressionistic nucleus of the Pushkin and Hermitage. But it isWilliams of the National Gallery who makes the work. He has encapsulated in a few telling pages the history of Impressionist art and the part played by the American, Mellon, Chester Dale. As the result of an unusual Soviet-American collaboration, for the first time 277 masterworks from the three museums are reproduced in a single, handsome, monumental volume. Brief biographies preface the selections of each artist Cezanne, Degas, Matisse, Picasso, et al.