Public Catalogue Foundation

The UK's Oil Painting Collection

The United Kingdom holds in its galleries and civic buildings arguably the greatest publicly owned collection of oil paintings in the world. 200,000 publicly owned oil paintings are held in institutions ranging from museums large and small to town halls, universities, hospitals and even fire stations.

However, four in five of these paintings are not on view. Whilst many galleries make strenuous efforts to display their collections, many paintings across the country are held in storage, usually because there are insufficient funds and space to show them. Furthermore, very few galleries have created a complete photographic record of their paintings, let alone a comprehensive illustrated catalogue of their collections. In short, what is publicly owned is not publicly accessible.

The PCF's Work

Over the last few years the PCF has been photographing these paintings and collating information about each painting. In doing this it has been working closely with collections up and down the country. The PCF is now well over halfway through this project, having photographed nearly 110,000 paintings from over 1,600 collections. It expects to complete the digitisation programme by late 2012, funding permitting.

Putting the Project Online

Until recently, the PCF’s main focus was publishing a series of hard copy catalogues. Now its focus is turning to publishing online. Online access will allow users to search paintings by various criteria and view larger images, whilst collections will be able to update their painting records. Most importantly, it will give the PCF’s work a much larger and wider audience.

To achieve this aim, the PCF has entered into a partnership with the BBC to build the Your Paintings website. Together the two organisations are about to radically improve the public’s awareness of the oil paintings they own but, in most cases, cannot see. Your Paintings will launch in the summer of 2011.

Wisbech Town Council's painting's are not yet online - but you can have a look at other paintings in Wisbech and beyond and help tag them - see below

Canaletto 1697–1768, Regatta on the Grand Canal, Venice, Italy (detail) (c.1730–1739), oil on canvas, 149cm x 218cm, The Bowes Museum

See the nation’s oil paintings and contribute to an important project

Your Paintings is a brand new website that has just been launched by the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation. By the end of 2012 all 200,000 oil paintings in the national collection will be on this website.

Go to bbc.co.uk/yourpaintings to see this wonderful resource.

To allow users across the world to search these paintings for subjects that interest them, the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation need help identifying what can be seen in each painting. Can you help with this?

Clicking the link below will take you to Your Paintings Tagger. Without leaving your desk you will be led on a digital tour of paintings around the country. You will be shown, at random, a sequence of paintings and asked to ‘tag’ them. All you need to do is to look closely at the painting and report what you see.

Tagging is easy and enormous fun. And don’t worry, you don’t need to be an art expert to tag – anyone can make a valuable contribution to this important national project. Please have a go!