Only twenty-five at the time of his death in 1828, young Richard Parkes Bonington nevertheless was a seminal figure in the development of modernism in nineteenth-century French painting. This catalogue raisonné of his oil and watercolor paintings represents the first attempt to establish and present the artist's complete known oeuvre. Drawing on 25 years of research, Patrick Noon catalogues, analyzes, and reproduces 400 artworks now indisputably attributed to Bonington. Many of these paintings have never before been published.

The book sets Bonington's achievement in the context of the intellectual, social, and artistic ferment of high romanticism in Paris and London, and it shows the profound effect of his style on his friend and contemporary, Eugène Delacroix, and many others. Noon's detailed and accurate study will inform all future discourse on Bonington and his remarkable legacy.