David B. Warren
A compelling tale of art, history, and intrigue
When American museum curator Dickie Read stumbles upon a pair of eighteenth-century silver candlesticks in a remote chapel in Umbria, he sets off to solve a decades-old mystery. His curiosity and knowledge of antique artifacts lead him to uncover the history of a Jewish girl hidden from the Nazis during World War II. As Dickie delves deeper, he discovers a connection to a famous American expat who inherited a fabled trove of eighteenth-century gold hollowware long believed to have been lost during the war.
With the help of the beautiful Marchesa Lucrezia Atti, Dickie embarks on a journey across Europe and America to piece together the artifacts’ history. Met with dead ends and danger—including an encounter with the infamous Red Brigades—Dickie forges on to bring closure to an enduring family mystery and restore the hollowware to its rightful place.
A noted decorative arts scholar, David B. Warren crafts an intriguing story about the search for lost history set against the backdrop of historical Italy. With animated characters and rich details, Going for the Gold beautifully blends the mysteries of museum artifacts and the forgotten past into a novel of discovery.
David B. Warren is an expert on American decorative arts and the founding director emeritus of the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, the former home of philanthropist Ima Hogg that is now a museum of American decorative arts and paintings owned by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and was educated at Princeton University and in the graduate program at the Winterthur Museum. Upon completion of the two-year Winterthur program, he moved to Houston, where he became the curator of Ima Hogg’s extraordinary collection at Bayou Bend. He remained at Bayou Bend, later becoming its director, until his retirement 38 years later, when he was given the title of Founding Director Emeritus. He is the author of a number of books on both furniture and silver, and was a frequent contributor to The Magazine Antiques. He served two terms on the Advisory Council at Mount Vernon, and as a trustee and later an emeritus trustee of the Winterthur Museum, a position he holds today.
On a whim in 1979, Warren, recently divorced, accepted an invitation from Janie C. Lee to come for a visit at her summer home, an ancient house made of local fieldstone near the Umbrian village of Camerata di Todi. They fell madly in love during the visit and the next year were married. Lee first owned an art gallery in Houston and later one in New York, where she and Warren had a pied a terre in the Upper East Side. Together, they spent forty blissful and culturally stimulating summers at the Umbrian house.
