American Paintings Of The Nineteenth Century Franklin Kelly

Working With American Paintings Of The Nineteenth Century Franklin Kelly

If you are researching nineteenth-century American paintings, you will eventually run into the National Gallery of Art's multi-volume catalogue raisonné that Franklin Kelly edited. I have spent years cross-referencing it against auction records, museum inventories, and private sales, and I will tell you straight: it is indispensable but not without its frustrations. The book covers works held at the National Gallery, but it also pulls in works from other institutions and private collections when they fit the artist's oeuvre. That scope is both its strength and its weakness. The set is published by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. You can find it through their website, through major academic booksellers, or through library copies. I bought a used set on AbeBooks for around four hundred dollars a few years back. New copies run roughly six hundred dollars per volume depending on the part. If you are a serious researcher, buying a used copy is worth it. If you are a casual reader, you are better off using your local university library's copy. The volumes are organized by artist, not chronologically or thematically. Each artist entry includes full bibliographic data, exhibition history, provenance, condition notes when available, and black-and-white plates. The plates are adequate but not generous in number. You will want to supplement this with color resources elsewhere for actual visual comparison.

What The Reference Actually Covers

The catalogue spans from the colonial period through the late nineteenth century, covering painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and dozens of others whose names appear in museum collections but rarely in popular consciousness. Franklin Kelly served as curator of American art at the National Gallery, and his editorial approach prioritizes documented works with verifiable provenance over speculative attributions. This is a deliberate choice that keeps the material reliable but means some paintings that are widely reproduced in books never make it into these volumes. I should note that the coverage is not exhaustive. Several major artists have entries, but others are sparse or missing entirely depending on which volume you are consulting. The National Gallery's own collection forms the core, but works from institutions like the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston appear when their attribution to a specific artist is well established.

How I Use It In Practice

Here is the workflow I actually follow when working with this reference. First, I identify the artist and locate their entry. The indexes at the back of each volume are helpful but not perfect. I have found misfiles and inconsistent spelling across different print runs. Second, I cross-reference the provenance chain against Sotheby's and Christie's auction archives. The catalogue lists provenance up to its publication date, which means recent sales are not included. Third, I check the condition reports and compare them against any existing restoration documentation. The condition notes are sometimes cursory, especially for works that entered the National Gallery collection before conservation standards were as rigorous as they are now. The plates section is where you will spend most of your time. They are arranged by artist and generally show the work from a straight-on angle. I usually pull up high-resolution images from the respective museum's online collection alongside the catalogue plate. The catalogue's reproductions are not going to help you distinguish an original from a copy on visual merit alone. For that you need better imaging. I ran into a specific problem last year involving a painting attributed to George-Inness that appeared in a regional auction. The catalogue listed the work with a particular provenance and dimensions. The auction lot had slightly different dimensions and a provenance gap of about fifteen years that the catalogue did not address. I spent three days tracing that gap through estate sale records and a 1923 sale catalog from a defunct New York gallery. The workaround was pulling microfilm records from the New York Public Library's auction archive collection. The catalogue alone would have left that gap unexplained. This happens more often than you might expect with nineteenth-century American works, where documentation is routinely incomplete.

Common Pitfalls

The biggest mistake I see researchers make is treating the catalogue as definitive rather than as a starting point. It is a reference tool, not a final word. Attribution disputes exist outside its pages. Some works it includes are themselves subject to scholarly debate. A few entries have been revised in later printings, and if you are working from an older edition, you may be reading superseded information. Another issue is the handling of workshop productions and attributions. Kelly and his team tend to list works with conservative attribution language. A painting might be listed as "attributed to" or "circle of" without much elaboration. If you need to understand the reasoning behind an attribution decision, you will often have to consult the scholarly literature separately. The catalogue does not provide extensive critical essays on individual works. The bibliography at the end of each artist section is useful but dated. It reflects the state of scholarship at the time of publication. New discoveries, new attributions, and new scholarship published after the catalogue's appearance will not be included. I routinely supplement my research with JSTOR searches, museum publication databases, and the ongoing scholarship from organizations like the Society of Americanists.

Alternatives And Complements

If the Kelly catalogue is your only resource, you are working with an incomplete picture. The Smithsonian Institution's research publications, the Yale University Press series on individual American artists, and the online databases maintained by the Smithsonian American Art Museum fill in many of the gaps. The Dictionary of American Artists, also available through the Smithsonian, is another reference that complements the National Gallery catalogue well. For works that fall outside the National Gallery's holdings, the catalogue raisonnés published by individual museums and research foundations are often more detailed. The problem is that not every artist has one. The coverage is uneven across the field. This is a structural limitation of American art historiography that no single reference can solve. I also recommend the Paintings and Sculpture volumes from the National Gallery's own online collection. They sometimes include additional photographs and updated scholarship that postdates the print catalogue. The online version is not consistently updated either, but it is worth checking before assuming your information is current.

Final Notes On Using This Reference

The National Gallery's American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century edited by Franklin Kelly remains one of the most important single sources for anyone working in this field. It is accurate where it is thorough, reliable where the documentation exists, and frustratingly incomplete where it does not. Treat it as a foundation, not a conclusion. Verify every attribution against additional sources. Check the publication date of the edition you are using. And keep a file of recent auction results and scholarship updates, because the catalogue will not. The time investment is real. A single artist entry can take two to three hours to fully research using this volume as your primary reference. If you are researching a lesser-known artist, factor in even more time because the supporting literature is thinner. But the payoff is a documented, cited foundation that other scholars will recognize and respect. That matters in this field more than most people outside it understand.