Public Invited to Catalogue Local Paintings as All Staffordshire Oil Paintings Go Online for the First Time

LONDON, October 25, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

The Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF), in partnership with the BBC, today announced that all oil paintings in public ownership in Staffordshire have been uploaded to the Your Paintings website for the nation to enjoy. Your Paintings is a project to create a complete online catalogue of every oil painting in the national collection, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/yourpaintings

Paintings by Freud, Gainsborough, Lichtenstein, Lowry, Renoir and Reynolds are among the 2,500 paintings in Staffordshire that can now be seen on Your Paintings. More than 30 collections including those in the metropolitan boroughs of Wolverhampton, Walsall and Sandwell are involved in this ground-breaking national project to reveal paintings that are both on display and in store across the country.

Major collections such as those at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, and The New Art Gallery Walsall are featured alongside smaller collections such as those of Keele University and Leek Town Council. Together their paintings provide a unique insight into the history and artistic heritage of Staffordshire.

To help the BBC and PCF identify and catalogue what is in each painting the public is being invited to 'tag' the paintings in Staffordshire. Tagging is easy and fun and you don't need to be an art expert to do it. The results will allow future users of the Your Paintings website to find paintings of subjects that interest them. Your Paintings Tagger is at http://tagger.thepcf.org.uk

Quotes

Jo Digger, Head of Collections, The New Art Gallery Walsall, said:

"We are delighted to be involved in this fantastic project, which gives access to our collections to so many people."

Jean Milton, Collections Officer, Arts,The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, said:

"This project is the perfect opportunity to show there are many outstanding collections in Public Institutions throughout the whole of the United Kingdom."

Corinne Miller, Head of Arts & Heritage, Wolverhampton Arts and Heritage, said:

"Wolverhampton is delighted to get more exposure for our easel painting collection through inclusion on the BBC Your Paintings website. The PCF have already created a lot of interest in our collection for which we are especially grateful."

Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate, said: "The Your Paintings website is an important undertaking that will reveal the depth and breadth of the nation's collections of paintings, many of them published online for the first time. Through ambitious collaboration between organisations across the UK this bold project complements our ambition to connect audiences with art in an immediate way online, something we will take for granted in the future."

Andrew Ellis, Director of the Public Catalogue Foundation, said: "No country has ever embarked on such a monumental project to showcase its entire painting collection online. Working with collections and individuals all over the UK, this project will reveal to the world the UK's extraordinary holding of oil paintings."

Roly Keating, BBC Director of Archive Content, said: "Our partnership with the PCF encapsulates so many of the BBC's ambitions, both as a public service broadcaster and key supporter of the UK arts sector. Your Paintings will be a hugely valuable learning resource for our audience and demonstrates the power of working with partners to open up the nation's cultural resources."

Press Images

Press images are available from Laura Marriott at laura.marriott@thepcf.org.uk or on
+44(0)20-7395-0330

Notes to Editors

About Your Paintings

Your Paintings is a partnership project between the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation to put the United Kingdom's entire collection of oil paintings online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/yourpaintings. Showing not only photographs and information about each painting but also selected BBC TV archive and links to further information, this website is emerging as a unique learning resource. The website was launched at the National Gallery in June of this year. Currently, the site shows around 80,000 paintings from 1,200 collections.

In all, the national oil painting collection amounts to some 200,000 works, held in 3,000 galleries, museums, universities, hospitals and other public institutions all over the country, making it probably one of the largest and most diverse collections of paintings in the world. The plan is for all these paintings to be online by the end of 2012.

With the help of crowd-sourcing technology pioneered by the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University to classify galaxies and Art Historical input from Glasgow University, the public are being invited to determine how the paintings will be catalogued as they tag and classify each painting.

About the Public Catalogue Foundation

The PCF is a registered charity. It was launched in 2003 to create a photographic record of all the oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom. In addition to publishing its work online, the PCF is also publishing a series of printed catalogues. The Staffordshire volume was released in 2007.

The painstaking research to locate the paintings up and down the country and collate the data has been carried out by 50 researchers. Over 30 fine art photographers have been employed to take the photographs over the life of the project. London-based staff and freelancers focus on fundraising, processing and editing the data that comes in from the field and clearing copyright.

The PCF was founded by Fred Hohler. Its trustees comprise Charles Gregson (Chairman), Robert Hiscox (Chairman of Hiscox PLC), Menna McGregor (Clerk of the Mercers), Alex Morrison (MD of Cogapp), Ricky Roundell (Vice Chairman of Christie's UK), Marc Sands (Tate Audience and Media Director), Charles Saumarez Smith (Chief Executive of the Royal Academy), Graham Southern (founding partner of Blain Southern) and the artist Alison Watt. The Director is Andrew Ellis.

For more information go to http://www.thepcf.org.uk

About BBC Online

BBC Online is BBC's portfolio of websites, available at bbc.co.uk. It comprises ten Products - News, Sport, Weather, CBBC, CBeebies, Knowledge & Learning, Homepage, Search, TV & iPlayer and Radio & Music. In April 2011, it had 31.7 million unique browsers and was the fourth most popular website in the UK. It is the only UK-owned website in the UK top ten. Your Paintings is part of the Knowledge & Learning Product.

The BBC creates partnerships with the arts sector that go beyond broadcast, from sharing expertise to widening public engagement in UK arts.

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Media Enquiries

For the Public Catalogue Foundation: Jane Quinn/Matthew Brown, Bolton & Quinn +44(0)20-7221-5000, jq@boltonquinn.com

For BBC Communications: Jenny Brown +44(0)208-576-2272/+44(0)7714-956744/ Jenny.brown1@bbc.co.uk