Established by an act of parliament in 1824, Britain's National Gallery was the first great public art museum created without a royal family's help, England's Royal Collections having never been nationalized. This unwieldy book bills itself quite correctly as a "complete" catalog: perhaps the world's most spectacular gathering of Western paintings is arranged alphabetically by artist, numbering over 2200 pieces at three per page. But as the book's frustrating design reveals, the collection is simply too enormous to show in some 750 pages. Although each artist gets two to three sentences of biographical text and each painting bears a paragraph-long caption, the illustrations could have been larger than an eye-straining two-and-one-half inches in height‘particularly maddening when each page contains a great deal of blank space. While for the National Gallery this exhaustiveness is especially relevant, because unlike most institutions its full collection is almost always on display, this is clearly a book that will appeal more to art or museum scholars than connoisseurs of fine painting. An impressive but flawed compendium; for large academic libraries only. (CD-ROM not seen.)‘Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., Cal.
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