The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, owns one of the nation's preeminent collections of American paintings. The first work of art acquired by the Museum upon its founding in 1870 was an American painting, Elijah in the Desert, by the esteemed local painter Washington Allston.

Since then the collection has grown to include some of the best-loved master-pieces of American art: John Singleton Copley's portrait of patriot Paul Revere: Gilbert Stuart's George Washington, the famous "Athenaeum" likeness of the first president; Fitz Hugh Lane's poignant Owl's Head from Penobscot Bay, Maine; Winslow Homer's stirring Grand Banks drama. The Fog Warning: John Singer Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit; Mary Cassatt's The Tea; and, among twentieth-century masterpieces, Edward Hopper's Drug Store and Georgia O'Keeffe's Deer's Skull and Pedernal.

Every American painting in the Museum's collection - more than 1600 in all - is recorded and illustrated in this book, the first comprehensive catalogue of the collection to appear in nearly thirty years. Extensive new research, resulting in a significant number of changed attributions and titles (summarized in the book's five indices), make this catalogue an indispensable tool for scholars and American art enthusiasts alike.