Catalogue raisonnés are always long projects, running into decades, and often the life’s work of their authors. Patrick Noon’s Richard Parkes Bonington: The Complete Paintings is no exception, written painstakingly over three decades. The volume is very well illustrated, and the meticulous and complete catalogue entries form a continuation of Noon’s exhibition catalogue from 1991, Richard Bonington: On the Pleasures of Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press). Since that time, Noon has discovered archival material and has translated letters by Bonington’s traveling companion, Charles Rivet. The few earlier studies on Bonington range from reliable to full of errors and misattributions. Setting Bonington’s record straight is one motive that propels Noon’s study.

Despite dying shortly before he turned twenty-six, Bonington (1802–1828) produced a prodigious number of paintings and was extremely popular in both France and Britain. An English artist beloved in France where he lived, he was lauded as one of the trilogy of Romantic painters, along with Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault, and much admired by, among many others, Camille Corot and the critic Théophile Gautier, who considered Bonington the originator of a modern revolution in French painting. His works also were forged and imitated by his contemporaries.

Noon’s book is timely; despite Bonington’s near erasure from art history for a variety of reasons, the artist has increasingly become the focus of scholarly attention as a link between British and French Romanticism. One indication of some of the problems Noon faced was that the artist rarely assigned titles to his works, whose topographic imagery along with Noon’s retracing of Bonington’s travels led the author to provide most of the titles. Bonington also failed to date many of his works, another formidable task for Noon, in the service of separating works from a veritable industry of forgeries of Bonington’s paintings. Noon divides his book by medium and subject matter. Largely a painter in watercolor until he turned to oil a few years before he died, Bonington limited his content to landscape, Italian scenes, and figural subjects. Noon organizes paintings from his Italian trip by subjects, but arranges landscapes and figural subjects by chronology, though the reasons for this distinction are not entirely clear. Bonington’s drawings are not catalogued in this volume, although some are illustrated in the introduction or beside their finished paintings.

Son of a modestly successful regional Nottingham artist and an educated London mother, Bonington was born in Nottingham where his parents ran a school for young ladies and his father organized a “repository of the arts,” a common eighteenth-century form of artistic education through the rental of drawings, watercolors, and prints. Following economic problems in the 1810s, the family, like many others, emigrated to the Continent. They went to Calais where they engaged in a tulle manufacturing business with two compatriots. The family then moved to Paris to build a retail outlet for their Calais-manufactured goods. By around 1825, Bonington’s income from art supported the family.

Using his expertise in watercolor painting from the end of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth century, Noon threads through the various and spotty sources contemporary with Bonington to construct possible paths of Bonington’s education—copying Northern genre painting in the Louvre under his father’s tutelage and his training under Louis Francia and Baron Antoine-Jean Gros. Noon examines the Ecole des Beaux-Art’s practices, competitions for spaces in rooms of study and for awards (Bonington placed in some of these), and Bonington’s juvenilia. Leaving Gros in 1821 as a result of a sharp and public split, Bonington took off for Normandy, not a typical sketching-tour site, and engaged in fresh depictions of its coast and its workers. At this time, Bonington was infected by the new fashion for French medievalism, a taste for ruins, and an awakening sense of national history, which had occurred earlier in Britain. He began a commission for Jean-Frédéric d’Ostervald, Swiss publisher of popular illustrated travel books.

Bonington’s career went well; the influential Société des Amis des Art purchased his works at high prices, and critics praised him in the press. He returned reconciled to Gros’s studio and received commissions, becoming “the rage” by 1823 among dealers, collectors, and publishers. He also was extensively imitated by his peers. Noon carefully describes Bonington’s career in relation to Salon exhibitions, other artists’ careers, technical aspects of moving from watercolor to oils, the practices of artists in both media, the relationship between plein air painting (de rigueur by 1820 in France) and the process of finishing landscapes in the studio, and the demise of Davidian classicism in France coupled with the end of the hierarchy of genres. The last two were often blamed by French critics on the bad influence of British artists inspired by British literature, over-attentive to commercial genres of illustration and watercolors, and too appreciative of eighteenth-century art.

In 1824, Bonington, John Constable, and Copley Fielding won gold medals at the Salon, where they had been encouraged to exhibit by French dealers who promoted their works. Of course British art had French detractors as well. Noon examines the critical appraisals and landscape categories debated by French critics and by the British art writers William Hazlitt and Richard Payne Knight amid these growing trans-Channel interactions in which the academies in both countries were criticized. The genre of landscape was much debated, caught at the intersection of national identities with art-historical canons: should they be ideal or local, mundane or grand, unaffected or posed in the “juste milieu,” happy medium ideal?

Encouraged by this artistic climate to travel to Britain, like many French artists Bonington visited London where he explored the British Museum’s treasures and its print room, funerary monuments in Westminster Cathedral, and a famous collection of armor. He also visited many British artists, collectors, engravers, and London theaters. One result of this trip was his move toward more varied subjects and complex techniques and styles. Like many British landscape artists, with the exception of Constable, Bonington began to “engage in a more direct dialogue with past and modern masters” (37) and to undertake plein air sketches in oil. As a result of this trip, Delacroix extended his friendship and invited Bonington to share his Paris studio in 1826. Bonington’s works received a very positive response when shown at the British Institution in 1826, and soon afterward he was much sought after by prominent British critics and collectors. He visited London again in 1827 where he cultivated clients and received commissions.

Noon includes excerpts from Rivet’s letters on his and Bonington’s trip to Italy through the Alps, and comments by Bonington’s contemporaries on his Venetian scenes, which were frequently compared to Canaletto’s. Noon compares Bonington’s watercolor techniques following this trip and his increasing use of opaque colors to Delacroix’s techniques.

The introductory essay on Bonington’s life and work is nicely illustrated by works of Bonington’s British and French contemporaries, as well as by his own drawings, sketches, and lithographs. Noon parses Bonington’s style at every stage to determine influences, both artistic and commercial, in his departures from standard studio practices and the conventions and content of landscape painting, including his use of peasants, workers, and allusions to literature. Along the way Noon raises and sometimes dispels undocumented arguments and anecdotes about Bonington’s influences and training. He broadens Bonington’s world by explaining French historians’ writings and their changing notions of history, highlighted by a nice comparison between Bonington’s history paintings and the influential writings of historian Prosper de Barante. Lacking diaries, memoirs, or even a significant body of letters, Noon cautiously applies written information, presenting a wealth of journalistic criticism, as well as his connoisseurship of visual sources. Following his introduction, he appends a detailed chronology of the artist’s life up to the death of family members in 1838, James Roberts’s biographical note on his friend Bonington, and two notes on Bonington in letters from Delacroix. Among the catalogue entries, Noon provides engaging sections on the Venetian works, describes scenes and depicted architecture, and explains literary sources in Bonington’s figure studies, which include Orientalist and light genre subjects. Noon also provides vital indexes of owners, sales, engravers, and titles at the end of the catalogue.

Richard Parkes Bonington: The Complete Paintings will undoubtedly inspire future scholarship on Bonington. Noon carefully fills in biographical gaps, often with circumstantial evidence from contemporary art writings, other artists’ careers, and the artistic worlds of London and Paris from the late eighteenth century to 1830. In reconstructing these worlds, he not only recaptures Bonington’s life and career but also the commercial worlds of prints, watercolors, and exhibition venues in a period often lost between studies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Noon recreates the vigorous artistic exchanges between France and Britain as artists and their works went back and forth, sharing a rich transcultural moment that would mark and even determine the directions of many artistic movements for the rest of the nineteenth century.