David Brown Milne (1882 - 1953) was one of the great artists of his generation in North America, according to the American art critic Clement Greenberg, who compared Milne with John Marin and Marsden Hartley. This comprehensive and fully illustrated Catalogue Raisonné of Milne's paintings is the first catalogue on this scale to be published for any Canadian artist, and it will be a standard for many years to come. The nearly three thousand paintings in oil and watercolour that David Milne produced in his long career are presented here in chronological order. There are also two hundred large-format colour reproducitons of his work.

Milne has long been a favourite of artists, art historians, curators, and collectors, and his high intelligence and fine sensibility are evident on every page of this remarkable work. Over a span of more than fifty years Milne devoted himself to painting and also to writing about painting - assessing his achievements against his goals, analysing aesthetic problems, describing a sequence or process, illuminating the origins of his inspiration. He wrote many hundreds of pages of notes, letters, and autobiographical accounts, most of them directly or indirectly about his art. Substantial quotations from his writings make the Catalogue Raisonné a highly readable reference work.

Each entry in the catalogue contains a black-and-white reproduction of the work, the basic information about the medium, size, and date, its full provenance and exhibition history, all printed references to it, a complete list of the documents in which it is referred to, and supplementary information, such as comments by the authors, related drawings, and cross-references, as appropriate.

Short essays introduce each period of Milne's life, providing useful biographical details and information on the paintings and their subsequent history. The Catalogue Raisonné also contains the major lists of paintings prepared by Milne over the years, key documents for any study of his work. There is a list of nearly six hundred exhibitions in which his work appeared with full details and a 1600-item bibliography. A comprehensive title index is also included.

David Milne teaches Canadian politics at the University of Prince Edward Island and has advised PEI governments on constitutional matters. He is the author of Tug of War: Ottawa and the Provinces under Trudeau and Mulroney and co-editor of The Garden Transformed: Prince Edward Island 1945-1980.

David Milne's profile page

David P Silcox, managing director of Sotheby's Canada, is an art historian, a cultural administrator and a senior fellow at Massey College He is also widely recognized for his writings on the artists David Milne, Christopher Pratt and Jack Bush

David P. Silcox's profile page