A lively text by the director and associate director of the Museum provides a biography of the Museum's benefactor, a history of the buildings that have housed his collections, and an overview of the collections themselves - first formed by Getty during his life and greatly expanded in the years following his generous and much-publicized bequest.

Rarely seen photographs reveal the life that Getty led as he traveled the world building his oil empire and, during the later part of his life, in his great Tudor mansion in England. Documents and photographs from the archives of the Museum take readers through the painstaking construction first of the Villa in Malibu and then of the new Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Specially commissioned photographs by noted architectural photographer Tom Bonner offer the first glimpses of the splendid galleries and dramatic exteriors of the new Museum. Finally, reproductions of more than 100 masterpieces show the range and depth of the Getty Museum collections.