Art Historical Resources:

Public Catalogue of Works of Art in UK Museums

Events and Conferences
International Conferences
On 16 December 2011 Andrew Ellis, the Director of the UK's Public Catalogue Foundation, which is collaborating with the BBC on the Your Paintings project to put all the UK's publicly owned paintings online, announced that a further 40,000 paintings have been added to the initial upload. This brings the total number of paintings from UK public collections now online to 104,000, over half the national collection. It is estimated that the entire national collection of 200,000 paintings, which is held in 3,000 galleries, museums, libraries and public institutions, making it one of the largest and most diverse collections in the world, will be online by the end of 2012.

Launched in June 2011, Your Paintings now contains the works of over 23,000 artists. The site is interactive and fully searchable by artist, collection and location, and provides links to the collections themselves.To make the site searchable by subject matter, over 5,000 members of the UK public have signed up as taggers, alongside curators and experts, participating in the task of cataloguing the collection online in a way which will allow searches for a wide range of subject matter across the website.

January 2013: All 212,000 of the UK’s oil paintings are now online: The Public Catalogue Foundation and BBC have just completed their ambitious project to put all the oil paintings in the UK in public ownership on the web. The UK is the first country to achieve this in a scheme which saw 3,217 venues across the country taking part. As well as paintings held by museums and galleries, the project encompasses those owned by universities, local councils, community centres, zoos, hospitals, fire stations and a lighthouse. 80% are not on view and had never previously been photographed. See BBC Your Paintings.
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