Michael Quick
George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonné.
Rutgers University Press, 1,274 pages (two volumes), $400
In today’s world, the production of a catalogue
raisonné—the complete inventory of an artist’s oeuvre,
in which the provenance, exhibition history, and published
criticism of each work is comprehensively documented—is
nearly a Herculean feat. The market for costly reference
books was always small and largely limited to university
libraries, which are increasingly unwilling or unable to buy
such specialized literature, preferring to invest in online
reference works. This has not been lost on academic
publishing houses, which once viewed it as their duty to
bring out the significant scholarship on the canonical
figures, regardless of the market. But without a canon,
there can scarcely be canonical figures. Finally, the
pressures of an academic career tend to discourage the kind
of selfless scholarship needed to produce a catalogue
raisonné. (No prudent careerist, for example, would invest
a decade or more in a research project when the timetable
for tenure is seven years.) For these reasons, and others,
Michael Quick’s catalogue of the works of George Inness is
cause for jubilation.
Few American artists have been the subject of such a
catalogue, a list that includes John Singer Sargent, Andy
Warhol, Edward Hopper, and—soon to be released—N. C.
Wyeth. Oddly enough, there already was a fine Inness
catalogue raisonné, published by LeRoy Ireland in 1965. But
Quick’s massive two-volume work, with its wonderfully
detailed entries on 1,154 paintings and splendid corpus of
color photographs,
