Your Paintings.

July 10, 2011 2:35 PM

Your Paintings a joint initiative between the BBC, the Public Catalogue Foundation and participating collections and museums from across the UK, is a website which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real. It is made up of paintings from thousands of museums and other public institutions around the country. Currently the archive contains 63,000 of the approximately 200,000 publically-owned artworks that make up the national collection.

The archive is searchable by artist as well as by venue. The venues range from The National Gallery and The Victoria and Albert Museum, all the way down to parish libraries and local police stations.

posted by dng (12 comments total)

Such an amazing resource, definitely bookmarked. Thanks so much!
posted by Jehan at 2:49 PM on July 10, 2011

MY GOSH! Bookmarked by me, too. Thank you so much for posting this. A wonderful and inspiring resource for sure!
posted by zagyzebra at 3:43 PM on July 10, 2011

am i so happy about this i died and am now dead. From happiness.
posted by The Whelk at 4:12 PM on July 10, 2011 [2 favorites]

Looks like they punted on identifying public domain works. Obviously PD works are just linked to some pointless boilerplate and a mention that everything is watermarked.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:12 PM on July 10, 2011

This is absolutely fabulous. What a great way to track down all the publicly viewable work by an artist.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 5:42 PM on July 10, 2011

This is exactly the kind of government waste a user pays system would eliminate.
There is no role for government in consolidating cultural information for the benefit of the public. Services like this are stealing food from the table of the highly taxed wealthy to benefit a bunch of lay about art students.
And the government has effectively destroyed the market for any future business that attempted to charge viewers for this information. Blatant, disgusting socialism!
Nice find.
posted by bystander at 7:39 PM on July 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

Oh wow, my dear Sis is the art historian who logged the paintings for that in Devon for a couple of years now. She'll be so pleased by the positive comments in this thread. She says: "Unfortunately the Devon collections aren't online yet, but there are wonderful paintings to discover and also tag with the really cool feature called Paintings Tagger. Tag paintings for the nation! Fun!"
posted by nickyskye at 7:59 PM on July 10, 2011 [2 favorites]

These kinds of things are great, so useful and at some point I imagine they will be more common. Thank you for posting this.

my dear Sis is the art historian who logged the paintings for that in Devon for a couple of years now
nickyskye

And thank you to your sis for all the work she did to help bring this online.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 10:47 PM on July 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

Another big thanks for posting this!

Ah how I envy the Brits for this kind of stuff. Ah how I wish every country did this...
posted by bitteschoen at 4:39 AM on July 11, 2011

This got a plug at the end of The World's Most Expensive Paintings (iPlayer) last night.

Interesting programme, if only to show that a) people will pay a lot of money for artists' B-sides and b) almost all the good stuff is (thankfully) in public hands.
posted by bright cold day at 5:18 AM on July 11, 2011

Communism!
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 2:25 PM on July 11, 2011

Related programming that recently ran on the BBC: Hidden Paintings, which is no longer available online (and clips are only available in the UK). For everyone else, here's a newsclip for Hidden Paintings with Paul McGann (on YouTube), and Hidden Paintings of the North West, one of the episodes hosted by McGann (also on YouTube).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:51 AM on July 15, 2011 [1 favorite]