View of Melbourne from the Botanic Gardens, Marianne North (1830–1890), 1880s. Photo credit: Royal Botanic Garden, Kew.
The very successful Your Paintings website begun by the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation back in 2011 has been succeeded by a new website called ArtUK, now run by the Public Catalogue Foundation with support from the BBC. It is great to see such a useful website growing and expanding. Digital spaces that aggregate information from a variety of collections are really important, gallery and museum databases are invaluable, but often as a researcher you aren’t sure what is held where, and your chances of knowing that there is, say, a small portrait by your artist held in a regional town hall might be pretty well zero. These aggregate websites are also especially important for image researchers as web search tools like Google still often fall short, a google search on a specific artist is often flooded with the same well-known image again and again, while image searches on themes or subjects can be pretty hopeless.
Your Paintings began with the aim of making available images and information on every publicly owned painting in the UK. These ranged from the collections of the National Galleries in England and Scotland through to the collections of local council offices and hospitals. The website has been hugely successful as a research tool, with some hard-to-locate paintings now readily available, the vast majority of paintings featured are not on public view. The website has also reached out to its suers from the beginning, YourPaintings included many crowd-sourcing initiatives, such as photo tagging and also invited users to share research and knowledge about the paintings through Art Detective. It’s great to read that this will continue to be an integral part of teh new website. There are also plans to link it with other databases, for instance the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and ArtUK will soon offer reciprocal links between portraits and biographies.
Useful features like Art Detective are part of the new website and there is a blog documenting the process. I have had a quick look and the information on each work is easy to find, images can be downloaded at a decent image quality and rights information is also given. Currently the website reports that it ‘features over 200,000 oil paintings by some 38,000 artists’. The new website will also expand beyond paintings with plans to include watercolours, pastels, drawings and prints uploaded by collections later this year. And in early 2017 sculptures will also be added. Going back to the original announcement I notice that in 2011 it was deemed ‘impractical’ to aim to digitise every watercolour owned by a public institution in the UK, I guess in just five years our digital horizons have expanded greatly.
You can visit the website here http://www.artuk.org/