Displaying items by tag: your paintings

Art Detective is a ground-breaking initiative that connects public collections in search of information about their oil paintings with specialists and members of the public with relevant knowledge. Whether it is to discover the name of a beautiful 1930s society hostess or the artist behind a Dutch seventeenth- century still life, Art Detective will help collections put names to unidentified sitters, places and events depicted in their paintings and the unknown artists behind works.

Art Detective addresses the serious issue of insufficient – and declining – specialist knowledge within public art collections. It is available to all 3,000 or so collections that participate in Your Paintings, the website created by the PCF in partnership with the BBC. The vast majority of these participating collections – many of which are not museums – do not have fine art curators, whilst many have lost experienced curators through funding cuts over the years.

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.