"This book, the first of its kind, sets a new standard as a work of reference covering British and Irish art in public collections from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. Nearly 9,000 painters are listed, with almost 90,000 paintings, in more than 1,700 separate collections. Within this vast coverage is another important category - those pictures that are now lost, mostly as a consequence of the Second World War, or have been de-accessioned, mostly in the period from about 1950 to about 1975 when Victorian art was out of fashion. The listing many tens of thousands of previously unpublished works, including around 13,000 which do not yet have any form of attribution, makes this book a unique and indispensable work of reference, and one that will transform the study of British and Irish painting."--BOOK JACKET.