Painting in galleries & public buildings in the UK are about to reach the masses with the launch of one of the largest online collections of paintings in the world. This treasure trove of tens of thousands of individual images, including works by some of the world’s leading artists, names include Picasso, Bacon, Warhol and Freud. The paintings aren’t just of interest to academics but art lovers internationally will have the opportunity to view one of the biggest pre-photographic records of 600 years of British society, life and culture. This hugely important educational and historical resource will give the public access to this incredible resource. 80% of the works are in storage, or otherwise unavailable to view; those that can be seen are scattered around the country, looked after by a diverse range of institutions, from the major national galleries right through to individual council offices and even fire stations, with no way for the public to see the scale of the combined collection. The vast majority have never been published online before.
The Public Catalogue Foundation is a charity established to document and photograph this national collection, have teamed up with the BBC and thousands of galleries and collections right across the UK to make the entire national oil painting collection permanently viewable in one place for the first time, for free to the general public. Our beta launch showcases the first 63,000 of these paintings, covering works from over 800 collections by over 15,000 individual artists. This is the start of a rolling programme of releases – we’ll be updating the site with thousands of new paintings in the coming months, in line with the PCF’s photography and digitisation programme, with the ambition of having the entire national collection – some 200,000 paintings – online by the end of 2012. The project is asking all interested members of the public to help tag the paintings Your Tags will help people to search the Your Paintings website.
Each painting will be Tagged by lots of people, so don’t worry if you aren’t 100% confident about your Tags. And remember, you don’t need to know about art to Tag these paintings giving a thought to think about whether future users of “Your Paintings” would find your Tags useful in searching for paintings.
Here is the Link