Art UK
| Formation | 2003 |
|---|---|
| Type | Charity |
| Purpose | To create a complete record of the national collection of oil, tempera and acrylic paintings in public ownership and make that accessible to the public. |
| Location | |
|
Region served
|
United Kingdom |
| Website | www |
Art UK is a registered charity in the United Kingdom, previously known as the Public Catalogue Foundation. It was founded for the project, completed between 2003 and 2012, of obtaining sufficient rights to enable the public to see images of all the approximately 210,000 oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom. Originally the paintings were made accessible through a series of affordable book catalogues, mostly by county. Later the same images and information were placed on a website in partnership with the BBC, originally called Your Paintings, hosted as part of the BBC website. The renaming in 2016 coincided with the transfer of the website to a stand-alone site. Works by some 40,000 painters held in over 3,000 collections are now on the website.
Future plans include a similar project to cover sculptures in public collections, which will begin in 2017. From June 2016 museums and other organisations will be able to upload images of their watercolour paintings, drawings and prints to the Art UK website; collections often hold far more of these than oil paintings.
The catalogues and website allow readers to see an illustration, normally in colour, and short description of every painting in the UK's national collections. This information has significant educational benefits and constitutes the building blocks for later art historical research. Revenue from catalogue sales made by collections is dedicated to the conservation and restoration of oil paintings in their care. Coverage includes national and local museums and council collections, paintings in universities, bishop's palaces of the Church of England, hospitals, the properties owned by the National Trust, and some other private institutions such as the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities. The collections of bodies such as Arts Council England, English Heritage and the Government Art Collection are included. However the Royal Collection is not included.
Art UK receives funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and other sources.
Of the 210,000 oil paintings in public ownership in the UK, around 80% are not on public view. Many are held in storage or civic buildings without routine public access. At the same time, many of these collections have incomplete cataloguing records; very few have more than a small proportion of their paintings photographed, and hardly any collection has a complete illustrated catalogue of its oil paintings in book form or online. Since 2003, The Public Catalogue Foundation has been working to rectify this through a series of colour catalogues. Before these were completed it was clear that a website was the best way to reach the wider public, a key aim of the project, so a combined approach was adopted.
...
Wikipedia