Welcome to an exciting new development at the intersection of publishing, scholarship, and technology. This digital publication represents, we believe, a model for the future of museum publishing that brings together current scholarship and state-of-the-art imaging technology in the service of one of the world’s great collections of Impressionist art. It is our belief that this innovative online platform will make the important curatorial and conservation research that is part of every museum’s mission more broadly accessible and illuminating.

Featured in exhibitions around the globe and in numerous scholarly and popular publications, as well as in our own galleries, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Impressionist collection is world renowned. The museum has contributed significantly to the scholarship on its own Impressionist holdings, as well as on nineteenth-century art in general, by organizing groundbreaking exhibitions focused on the material history of particular works, including Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South (2001) and Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte” (2004). But a comprehensive, systematic research project devoted to our Impressionist paintings and drawings had yet to be undertaken. This digital volume—on the work of Claude Monet—is the first in the series Paintings and Drawings by Artists of the Impressionist Circle at the Art Institute of Chicago.

We have long desired to publish a scholarly catalogue of our nineteenth-century holdings; our plans to do so began in earnest in 1999 with the establishment of the Art Institute’s David and Mary Winton Green Research Fund. Parallel to this research concern was growing within museums about the increasingly prohibitive costs of scholarly collection catalogues, their modest circulation in print, and the inability to update information once they have been released. These issues were the subject of a session on the fate of the permanent collection catalogue at the 2008 meeting of the Association of Art Museum Curators. Fortunately, the Getty Foundation chose this moment to launch its Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) to explore the possibilities of presenting collection research in new ways. It brought together a consortium of nine museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, to develop sustainable and replicable models for online scholarly collection catalogues and assess how a change in the way museums think about publishing might impact institutional structures. Our Monet catalogue embodies the Art Institute’s contribution to this effort. In addition to our gratitude to the Getty Foundation for its vision and generosity, we want to acknowledge major support from Mary Green, who with her husband, David, endowed the research fund that bears their names. The Art Institute has also received generous funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, organizations that are committed to facilitating the productive collaboration of art history with technology.

The Art Institute’s publishing model for the OSCI project is the result of numerous discussions with our in-house team as well as with colleagues in the larger OSCI consortium. Our primary challenge was twofold: first, we wanted to build a model that would address the requirements of scholars to have an authoritative, permanent, and citable research reference and would maintain the high standards of the Art Institute’s collection catalogues in print. Beyond that, however, we thought strategically about the potential benefits of an online publication and how to take full advantage of features that are available only in the digital realm. Indeed, our concept evolved through many hours of consideration; the specifics of our discussions are put forth by Gloria Groom in the introduction and acknowledgments of this catalogue. Always at the core of our conversations was the importance of contributing vital scholarship to the field and demanding that our online catalogue display the same academic rigor, curatorial insight, and editorial professionalism as its printed counterparts.

This project truly has been a collaborative endeavor. The curatorial dimension was overseen by Gloria Groom, Senior Curator and David and Mary Winton Green Curator of Nineteenth-Century European Painting and Sculpture in the Department of Medieval to Modern European Painting and Sculpture, with Jill Shaw, formerly Research Associate in the department and now Senior Curator of Collections at the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University. Conservation efforts were led by Frank Zuccari, Grainger Executive Director of Conservation; Kimberley Muir, Assistant Research Conservator; and Kelly Keegan, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow of Paintings Conservation. Former Executive Director of Publications Susan F. Rossen and her successor, Robert V. Sharp, and Sarah E. Guernsey, Director of Publications, have been critical to the success of this project. The efforts of D. Samuel Quigley, formerly the Art Institute’s Vice President for Collections Management, Imaging, and Information Technology/Chief Information Officer and now Director of the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut; Elizabeth Neely, formerly Director of Digital Information and Access; and members of the staff of the IMA Lab at the Indianapolis Museum of Art were vital to the technological strides that we have made. Having developed this model using open-source software, we hope that it will serve as a springboard for future online publications within the museum community and in the humanities more broadly.

Douglas Druick
President and Eloise W. Martin Director
The Art Institute of Chicago