A MUSEUM has launched a catalogue to accompany one of the largest collections of Impressionist paintings to appear in the region.

The Bowes Museum, in Barnard Castle, County Durham, has launched a full colour illustrated catalogue to represent its current major exhibition, the Road to Impressionism: Josphine Bowes and Painting in Nineteenth Century France.

The exhibition, showing until March 30, is one of the largest groups of French Impressionist paintings to come to the North-East and features works by Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro.

Proceeds from the sale of the catalogue will go directly towards conservation projects and future developments at the museum.

The catalogue, written by the exhibition's curator, Dr Howard Coutts, contains illustrations of the paintings featured in the exhibition as well as other relevant examples.

It also includes an introduction to the exhibition and its importance by Adrian Jenkins, the museum's director, and details of how the paintings in the museum's collection came to be purchased.

For specialists, it also includes important appendices devoted to the sale of artist's materials in the 1860s, and when Impressionist works first came on the art market.

Dr Coutts, also the museum's keeper of ceramics, said: "The Bowes Museum is one of the best museums in Britain to understand the changes of taste in the Nineteenth Century that led to the modern appreciation of art.

"The exhibition demonstrates to all our visitors that the Bowes Museum's collection is of international significance and explores the developments in French landscape painting, which laid the foundations for the Impressionist movement."

For further details about the catalogue, contact the museum at the www.bowesmuseum.org. uk website, or by calling (01833) 690606.