Imagine you have a big box filled with all of your toys. You love playing with them, but sometimes it's hard to remember which toys you have, and which ones you still need to collect.
Now imagine you had someone carefully looking at all of your toys, writing down their names, taking pictures of them, and making a list so that you never forget which toys you have. This would be like having a catalogue raisonné of your toy collection!
A catalogue raisonné is like a big list of all the works of art made by a particular artist. Just like your toy collection, artists can create a lot of different things over their lifetime, and it can be hard to keep track of all of them. A catalogue raisonné helps art historians and collectors keep track of everything an artist has made.
Making a catalogue raisonné is a lot of work! The people who do it need to spend time researching and finding every single artwork and information about it. They then organize this information into a book or website so that anyone who is interested in the artist can see what they've created.
So, a catalogue raisonné is like a big, organized list of all the artwork an artist has made, kind of like a catalogue of toys in a toy box.