For the study of art there may be nothing more important, and more impressive, than the catalogue raisonné. Literally a “reasoned” catalogue, the catalogue raisonné is a publication by a preeminent scholar or scholars that attempts to identify and describe all work produced by a given artist. Always printed in a small quantity, and with a price that reflects the expense of its production, such a book is rarely marketed to the general public, although it can be a beautiful object of art in itself.

The catalogue raisonné of the American painter George Inness (1825–94), recently published by Rutgers University Press and listed at $400, is no exception. Slipcased, weighing more than 16 pounds, with 1,274 pages divided among two volumes and nearly 150 color plates, it is a monument of scholarship on the iconoclastic painter of the Hudson River School, whose career spanned 50 years, from 1844 to his death. The publication of this catalogue is also a testament to the spell this artist can cast more than a century after his death. Behind the book is the story of the scholar who pursued the project for 15 years and the patron who made it possible.

This part of the story begins in the late 1980s, when New York financier Frank Martucci entered a Madison Avenue gallery and saw his first George Inness painting. He told me the painting encouraged him “to see beyond the canvas. There was a bigger world out there. Inness went beyond painting the everyday occurrences in life and expressed spirituality on canvas. He was an optimist, a non-conformist, a social egalitarian and an avid abolitionist.”

Martucci’s discovery had lasting repercussions for a self-effacing scholar named Michael Quick. In 1985 and ’86, Quick had organized a traveling retrospective of Inness’s works that began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was seen in Cleveland, Minneapolis and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (where he was curator of American art) and ended at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Fresh from the success of that show, as Quick related it to me, he ran into Martucci, who “expressed an interest in supporting scholarship and asked me to name a project that I thought was the most important. And I told him that an up-to-date, improved catalogue raisonné that combined all the information of other scholars would be most useful.” Though Martucci admits that, at first, he didn’t know what a catalogue raisonné was, this did not stop him from underwriting Quick’s labors for the time it took to produce the book. In fact, Martucci would make several commitments to Inness. In addition to building a personal collection of eight Inness landscapes, he funded the construction of an Inness wing at the Montclair Art Museum in Inness’s New Jersey hometown. And then there was the catalogue.