The years of laborious preparation devoted to this work show that its projectors have not only believed it to be needed, but have expected for it a novel as well as standard place among authorities upon its subject. The Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings founds its claim to this position especially upon three things: the character and comprehensiveness of the information which, through its text and illustrations, it for the first time makes accessible; the new simplicity of its arrangement; and the bibliography, of a kind hitherto unattempted, through which it furnishes a key and guide to the whole literature of its art.
It is not only a fuller biographical dictionary than now exists of the painters of all times and schools, including prominent contemporaries, but it is as well a dictionary of works; and in a form in which the one branch of information is as immediately accessible as the other. The important paintings of all periods are treated under their own names, in separate articles, in which are given an accurate description of each work, its date, its place of preservation, its history from the time of leaving the painter's easel, notices of its replicas and copies, the names of its engravers, and such other facts as make the account as nearly as possible exhaustive. Both biographical and descriptive articles are based, not upon statements accepted in any sense at second
