The Brooklyn Museum’s scholarly catalogue documenting its entire collection of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century American paintings is a landmark contribution to American art scholarship. Its elegant, clean, and user-friendly design belies the impressive breadth and depth of its content. It is fortuitous—though surely not originally foreseen—that the publication of the book, begun twenty years ago in response to the Luce Foundation’s grants program to support major museum catalogues of American paintings, coincides with the completion of the Brooklyn Museum’s Luce Center for American Art. The publication’s extensive entries and data on nearly 700 American paintings by 360 artists make a perfect study guide to the center’s galleries, visible storage, and study center. Similarly, principal author Teresa Carbone’s in-depth examination of the history of the museum and its world-renowned collection of American art—which distinguishes Brooklyn’s project from many other collection catalogues—coincides with the 150th anniversary of the founding of the museum’s collection. (Dr. Carbone, who has worked in Brooklyn’s American department for twenty years, also served as project director for the Luce Center, and was recently promoted to Andrew W. Mellon Curator.)

In the first of two sections comprising her introductory essay, “The Making of a Collection,” Carbone details the story of the Brooklyn Institute (forerunner of the Brooklyn Museum). Here is the tale of the colorful Augustus Graham (1775–1851), a farsighted British-born merchant and philanthropist who played a seminal role in founding and nurturing the institute, and of Walt Whitman’s heretofore little-documented but fascinating role in its advancement. In addition to promoting the institute during his lifetime, Graham bequeathed monies to commission works by living American artists; Asher B. Durand’s The First Harvest in the Wilderness (1855) was the first such undertaking and marked the official start of what would later become the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. Perhaps in part because Graham’s tireless promotion of American art in Brooklyn left difficult shoes to fill, the ensuing period proved somewhat fallow for the institute. This relative passivity continued even during the Civil War and antebellum periods, a surprising fact considering that art generally assumed an active role in the country’s war effort and the subsequent flourishing of U.S. cultural institutions.

In the second part of the essay, Carbone documents the rebirth of Brooklyn’s American painting collection and its “growth to full flower” (27) that resulted from the museum’s formal founding in 1897. This twentieth-century history is largely defined by the acquisition of contemporary American paintings by curators such as the legendary John I. H. Baur, who built the collection dramatically during his dynamic tenure from 1934 to 1952. Not to be underestimated are the acquisitions, exhibitions, and installations accomplished during the productive curatorship of Linda Ferber, Carbone’s predecessor (and now vice president and director of the museum at the New York Historical Society), who served from 1974 to 2005. Ferber’s detailed recounting of the fascinating story of Albert Bierstadt’s A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie (1866) and its important place in the artist’s oeuvre—despite being unlocated for nearly ninety years prior to its 1976 purchase by the museum—virtually makes for a catalogue within a catalogue.

It was Ferber who, early in her tenure at Brooklyn (in 1979), completed the precursor to the present volume, the first-ever catalogue of the museum’s American paintings collection. This much-needed checklist publication was typical for—and useful in—its time. However, in the 1980s Brooklyn’s American curators, like many of their colleagues in other museums, realized that such a catalogue would not meet the needs and interests of scholars in the burgeoning field of American art. At this time, Brooklyn was one of a number of museums to take advantage of the Luce Foundation’s American catalogue grants, which opened the doors to further support. (In these difficult fundraising times, it was savvy of the museum to prominently list the names of all of the project’s donors on a separate page in the present publication’s front matter.)

The groundwork, then, had been laid for the production of the present book, which offers enormous progress over its 1979 predecessor (again, in accordance with the growth of American art scholarship and museum collection catalogues in general). This is true not only of the inclusion of Carbone’s introductory essay, but particularly with regard to the user-friendly and comprehensive treatment and illustration of the paintings. Following the introduction in volume 1 are 161 color plates (in chronological order) reproducing the highlights of the collection. These, in turn, are followed by the catalogue itself. Volume 1 contains artists A–G, and volume 2 addresses artists H–Z, as well as a guide to the technical notes and a glossary of technical terms. Carbone, who wrote about 300 of the artists, was joined by Barbara Dayer Gallati (Curator Emerita of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum and independent scholar), who authored biographies and entries for fifty artists; Ferber, who wrote on seven; and Margaret Stenz, who contributed the entries on Robert Henri’s paintings. (Stenz was one of several researchers for the publication who compiled, or assisted in compiling, the extensive apparatuses for the paintings referred to below.)

Each painter represented in the collection is documented in the catalogue by a comprehensive biography and a shorter, interpretive catalogue entry or entries examining the painting(s) by that artist. The separate, detailed biographies are useful resources for lesser-known painters such as Louise Upton Brumback (1867–1929), a painter primarily of Gloucester, Massachusetts views. However, the inclusion of discrete biographies for more familiar artists like Brumback’s near contemporary George Bellows (1892–1925)—given the wealth of information readily available on the Internet and in other recent collection catalogues—seems somewhat unnecessary (if convenient to the reader). (Bellows’ inclusion in the catalogue, despite his post-1876 birthdate, is not explained in the text.) The project’s twenty-year preparation time may well explain this result; in any such long-term and complex undertaking, format decisions, once made, must be followed in order to advance a project.

Scholars of American art will find particularly useful the extensive apparatuses for each painting, which include comprehensive technical notes (based on examinations by the museum’s conservators) followed by provenance and exhibition history. At the end of each artist’s section is a bibliography encompassing both an exhaustive list of general sources on the artist as well as a less comprehensive selection of references to the individual painting(s) discussed. In the case of artists represented by a single painting, this bibliography format works reasonably well; but when an artist is represented by multiple works, the citations for individual paintings are integrated with the references to the artist, making it sometimes difficult to sort out which citation refers to which painting. Like the decision to publish extensive biographies, the one to include apparatuses in a print publication, while valuable in this instance, may be reconsidered in future projects given the technology available today; a painting’s exhibition and publication history can be outdated even before a catalogue such as Brooklyn’s is available for purchase.

American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum is perhaps among the last collection catalogues of its kind; like the mammoth undertakings published by, among numerous other museums, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (and, soon, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), this type of resource, however valuable, may be made obsolete by new technologies and by diminishing funds for projects of this complexity and preparation time. That said, no American scholar’s bookshelf should be without this excellent resource and enormous accomplishment by an outstanding team of scholars, and its incisive critical history of Brooklyn’s collection offers rich material for consideration.

In light of its size, price, and the scholarly audience for whom the two-volume catalogue is intended, the Brooklyn Museum made a practical decision to simultaneously publish a much smaller volume with broader appeal and a lower price. Carbone also authored this handsome gift book entitled An American View: Masterpieces from the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn Museum, in association with D Giles Limited, London, 2006; $45.00 hardback, 160 color and 20 black-and-white illustrations). This publication’s short introductory essay, informative and lively entries, over sixty color plates, and a chronology of Brooklyn’s American collection make it an extremely attractive and useful book, whether used as a companion to the larger catalogue or enjoyed on its own.