Paintings of the Americas Online Catalogue

This past week, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston launched "Paintings of the Americas," a free online catalog which documents 425 works in the museum's collection of nearly 2000 North, Central, and South American paintings.  The digital publication includes short essays on the various American art periods from the Colonial Era through the 20th-century Modernist movement, and, for each individual work, a detailed description including bibliography, provenance, and exhibition history:  of particular focus is the art of New England, with chapters devoted to John Singer Sargent, and the Impressionist works of the Boston School.  Designed to complement the Art of the Americas Wing, which opened in November of 2010, the catalog has been left open for expansion, so that eventually more works from the collection and future acquisitions can also be added.  

"We are committed to publishing the MFA’s collections by the best means available, whether the delivery ‘device’ has printed pages or a touch screen, " says Emiko Usui,  Director of MFA Publications.  "This type of catalogue is well-suited to the digital realm. It represents a true marriage of traditional museum publishing and all the scholarship behind it, and the accessibility and connectivity made possible by the web."  As MFA Publications continues its development of electronic media, plans have been made to offer several out-of-print books as PDF files, downloadable from their website, and to follow up their e-book of Sargent's Daughters (2009), with an e-catalog of an upcoming 2013 exhibition of Sargent's watercolors, jointly sponsored by MFA and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Edmund Charles Tarbell  -  Mother and Child in a Boat  -  1892 

Edmund Charles Tarbell  -  New England Interior  -  1906

John Singer Sargent  -  The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit  -  1882

Edmund Charles Tarbell  -  Reverie (Katharine Finn)  -  1913

Ellen Day Hale  -  Self Portrait  -  1885

Dennis Miller Bunker  -  Jessica  -  1890

Ignaz Marcel Gaugengigl  -  The Visitor  -  c. 1925

Gretchen Woodman Rogers  -  Woman in a Fur Hat  -  c. 1915

Joseph Rodefer DeCamp  -  The Blue Cup  -  1909

John Humphreys Johnston  -  Le Domino Rose  -  c. 1895

William McGregor Paxton  -  The New Necklace  -  1910

George Cochran Lambdin  -  Vase of Flowers  -  1873

Albert Bierstadt  -  Storm in the Mountains  -  c.1870

George Inness  -  Near Kearsarge Village  -  1875

William Trost Richards  -  Sunset on the Meadow  -  1861

Dennis Miller Bunker  -  The Pool, Medfield  -  1889

John Singer Sargent  -  The Master and his Pupils  -  1914

William Lamb Picknell  -  Morning on the Loing at Moret  -  c.1895

Frank Weston Benson  -  Calm Morning  -  1904

Frank Weston Benson  -  Eleanor  -  1907