Smith, John
A catalogue raisonné of the works of the most eminent Dutch, Flemish, and French painters … with a copious description of their principal pictures … a reference to the galleries and private collections in which a large portion are at present (etc).
London, 1829-42 (facsimile reprint, London, Sands & Company 1908).
Full Description
8vo. 9 vols. Publisher’s cloth, two volumes defective at joints of spine. One of 1250 sets issued. The late Gavin Henderson’s copy, with his bookplates.
An extensive listing of the oeuvre of the more celebrated Dutch, Flemish and French painters of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, compiled by a London picture dealer of the early nineteenth century as “the results of the observation of many years collecting, in France, Holland, Germany, and England”. His attributions of pictures to individual artists have been overtaken by time, but his catalogue is still of value as a record of who owned such paintings in Britain in the first forty years of the nineteenth century ; Smith dedicates his first volume to the politician Sir Robert Peel, by then a customer of his of twenty years’ standing, and he also had first-hand knowledge of the pictures owned by many other British art collectors of the period.