Culture

The paintings you didn’t know you owned

Art UK has created a digital gallery of 200,000 works in public collections

March 28, 2016
Hogarth's 'Altarpiece of St Mary Redcliffe', in Bristol City Council offices, just one of the works logged by the PCF ©Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, William Avery, Wikimedia Commons
Hogarth's 'Altarpiece of St Mary Redcliffe', in Bristol City Council offices, just one of the works logged by the PCF ©Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, William Avery, Wikimedia Commons


Hogarth's "Altarpiece of St Mary Redcliffe" painting, displayed in Bristol City Council offices. This work is digitally logged by the Public Catalogue Foundation—recent relaunched as Art UK ©Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, William Avery, Wikimedia Commons

Last month at the Houses of Parliament civil servants, curators, journalists and art lovers gathered to celebrate a major landmark. The Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) was relaunched as Art UK. For the last five years, the PCF has partnered with the BBC to create the Your Paintings website, the digital portal which gives access to the UK’s national collection of 200,000 oil paintings.

Much more than a simple name change, this relaunch was akin to Cinderella donning her party dress and going to the ball. The entirely worthy, not for profit, enterprise of cataloguing and digitising all the oil paintings in public ownership, whether in art galleries, council offices, obscure museums, schools or hospitals, has been transformed into the radical act of giving these art works back to the public. In the magnificent surroundings of Speaker’s House, where Augustus Pugin’s decorative detail testifies to Victorian pride in the public realm, this once shy charitable endeavour was revealed as a ground-breaking cultural initiative, in tune with visionaries of both past and present.

Until 2011 the PCF had beavered away quietly at its exhaustive task, publishing beautiful catalogues county by county. Some works had been hidden in storage for more than a generation, or located in offices not usually open to the public. Scholars and curators knew the value of this resource, but, beyond the major institutions such as the V&A, the National Gallery and the behemothic Tate, few smaller public art collections had the funds to make this information available to the wider public.

However in 2011 the PCF, led by Andy Ellis, teamed up with the BBC to provide a digital platform for all 3000 of their partner institutions. With wit, ingenuity and creativity, Your Paintings invited the public to explore the vast national storeroom of art held in its name, and to access, at will, the different layers of interpretation and supplementary material provided both by the galleries and by the BBC.

You could go online and see what was in your local public collection or whether there was an interesting painting in that Midlands town you were visiting next week. You could search by artist, or by genre. (Now, through Art UK, with a public library card, you can also access the OUP’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Grove Art Online.)

But while increasing numbers of art galleries and museums worldwide are expanding their educational responsibilities through the internet, enabling visitors from far and wide to access curatorial and art historical resources, Your Paintings went a step further. As well as serving the needs of committed art lovers, it has pioneered a style of interaction with the art at its disposal that is more truly democratic, reflecting the many different perspectives of members of the public.

Critical to this approach, and one embedded in the new Art UK, is the ability of the already more than 300,000 unique users each month to search the database by subject rather than by artist’s name or an art work’s title. People may come to art for all sorts of reasons—because they like cats, because they are interested in the Battle of Waterloo, because they are studying fashion, because they are meteorologists, because they love sailing or fishing or mountain climbing, because they wish to find a reflection in art of a particular emotion or experience. They may be less concerned that the painting is good, according to some received canon, than that it reflects their interests.

To enable this style of cross-referencing, website visitors are invited to tag the art works they view. So if there is a walking stick or a unicorn or a pair of lovers, you can tag it. So committed has the PCF, now Art UK, become to this style of searching that they have teamed up with a pioneering software company in Oxford to see if computers can be trained to search image databases by subject. A trial, requiring the programme to find all the paintings of beards, showed promising results.Other crowd-sourcing initiatives include Art Detective, which has enabled collections in need of information about their paintings—Who painted this? Who or what is the subject?—to engage the help of members of the public with specialist information. An anonymous portrait of a 20th-century “Rheumatologist” at the Royal Free Hospital in London has now been identified as Dr Charles Brehmer Heald. Previously unknown paintings by Van Dyke and Gainsborough have been identified.

Art UK has now outgrown its relationship with the BBC, although it remains a key partner. To be financially sustainable it needs to offer partner institutions a way of licensing images and selling prints and other merchandise. Meanwhile, it continues to expand the ways in which people can access and use the art in their ownership. This summer partner institutions will upload images of their prints, drawings and watercolours in addition to their oil paintings. With help from the Heritage Lottery Fund and other donors, Art UK has embarked on photographing the 100,000 sculptures and monuments in public ownership, to be available online over the next four years.

As the art world becomes increasingly pompous and the media fixates on the absurd prices paid for work by a handful of artists, it is good to be reminded, as the artist Bob and Roberta Smith declared in a painting commissioned for Art UK’s Westminster launch, that “Through our public collections, we all own art.”