A complete catalogue of every oil painting in the UK national collection is being compiled on a dedicated website. The collection contains around 200,000 works, and the ‘Your Paintings’ project, which is being run by The Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) in partnership with the BBC, is encouraging the public to get involved by tagging works and helping to classify paintings as they are uploaded to the site over the next 18 months. Crowd-sourcing technology, pioneered by the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, is enabling the public to join the experts in deciding how the works will be catalogued as they tag and classify each painting, and artist Alison Watt explains how to tag in a short film on the site. The paintings are drawn from 3,000 public collections which include the UK’s national museums and galleries, regional collections, and the National Trust, but also less obvious collections such as those in universities, council buildings, hospitals and fire stations. The site will feature online selections by artists, historians and celebrities including Yinka Shonibare, Rory Bremner, Frank Skinner, Dan Snow, Tracey Cox, Matt Baker, Gus Casely Hayford, Mary Beard, Alastair Sooke, Monty Don and the Reduced Shakespeare Company. The first phase of Your Paintings has seen the online publication of over 60,000 paintings by 15,000 artists from 860 collections. Related programmes will be aired during the summer across BBC TV channels, and until 24 July, selected highlights of the online collection will be shown in 20 cities across the UK on the BBC Big Screens.
