Displaying items by tag: public catalogue foundation

The smartly dressed man with frown lines and a bristling moustache is as much a mystery as the rollicking scene in Vulcan's forge, where a cherub is in imminent danger of being clouted by the blacksmith's hammer. They are among thousands of enigmatic paintings, hanging in galleries, council chambers, boardrooms and fire stations, about which almost nothing is known.

The public, however, is being invited to turn art detective, and help trace artists, dates, subjects and other helpful information about the paintings.

London’s Courtauld Gallery will put its entire collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings online as part of the Your Paintings project. The goal of the ten-year endeavor is to put the UK’s public collection of oil, acrylic and tempera paintings online. The UK is the first country in the world to give such access to its national collection of paintings. So far, 3,217 venues in the UK including the Tate and the National Gallery have participated in the project and 212,000 paintings can be accessed through the Your Paintings website.

The Your Paintings project is the result of a collaboration between the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) and the BBC. The PCF started making a photographic record of the nation’s oil paintings in 2003 while the Your Paintings website, built by the BBC, was launched with 63,000 paintings in June 2011. Typically, 80% of these paintings are not on view and a vast majority has never been photographed before.

The images and accompanying information about the works may be reproduced for non-commercial research and scholarly purposes.