Pick of the week
When he died in 1999, Coloradan financier William M. B. Berger had only been collecting). Today, the Berger Collection Trust sponsors an annual prize for the best art book in the field. The winner this year, from a shortlist of six, is Hugh Belsey's magnificent two-volume catalogue raisonnĂŠ of Gainsborough's portraits, fancy pictures and copies after Old Masters, published by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Center. Mr Belsey's whole career has been leading up to this and it is an extraordinary achievement. The catalogue includes about 1,100 paintings, 200 newly attributed, and there is much invaluable information on sitters, some of them previously unidentified.
