Formation | 2003 |
---|---|
Type | Charity |
Purpose | To create a complete digital record of the UK's collection of oil, tempera and acrylic paintings and sculpture and to make art accessible to the public. |
Location |
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Region served | United Kingdom |
Website | artuk |
Art UK is a cultural, education charity in the United Kingdom, [1] previously known as the Public Catalogue Foundation. Since 2003, it has digitised more than 300,000 paintings, sculptures and other artworks by more than 53,700 artists. [2]
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 50,000 painters held in more than 3,000 collections are now on the website. [3]
The catalogues and website allow readers to see an illustration, normally in colour, and short description of every painting and sculpture in the UK's national collections. This information has significant educational benefits and constitutes the building blocks for later art historical research. [4]
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, bishops' 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. [5] However, the Royal Collection is not included.
Art UK receives major funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and other sources.
In November 2016, Apollo magazine awarded Art UK the prize of "Digital Innovation of the Year". [6] It was given the "Digital Innovation of the Year" award again in 2022 in recognition of its achievement of cataloguing the UK's public sculpture. [7] Artist Yinka Shonibare is Art UK's 2019 patron and has praised the charity's efforts, "public sculpture is the most democratic way to share art [...] it transcends race, class, or economic status". [8]
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.
The Oil Paintings in Public Ownership book series is published by The PCF mainly on a collection or county-by-county basis. Each volume brings together all the oil, acrylic and tempera paintings in a county's museum collections, together with paintings held in civic buildings such as town halls, libraries, universities, hospitals and fire stations. Each county catalogue contains a colour photograph and basic information about each painting. All paintings are reproduced regardless of quality or condition.
The PCF's first catalogue was published in June 2004, and the series is now complete in 85 volumes (see partial list below).
The Public Catalogue Foundation worked with the BBC to put all of the UK's publicly owned oil paintings online. In January 2009 a partnership with the BBC was announced with the aim to place the entire catalogue of publicly owned oil paintings online by 2012. [9] On 4 October 2012 it was announced that the project had photographed every painting that it intended to and all 210,000 would shortly be available. [10]
A section of the BBC website, Your Paintings, [11] was launched in 2011. The PCF completed the digitisation of the entire national collection and celebrated their success in February 2013. [12] An innovative crowdsourcing project, Your Paintings Tagger, [13] also went online in 2011, to generate the metadata necessary to make Your Paintings fully searchable. The high-quality[ clarification needed ] digital files, however, have not been made available to the public, and paintings on the BBC site can only be "saved" as a "personal collection" on the site, not downloaded.
In March 2013 the BBC revealed that an unknown painting by Anthony van Dyck had been discovered because of the Your Paintings website. The painting of Olivia Porter, wife of Sir Endymion Porter, had been discovered on-line and although it was previously thought it to be in the style of the Van Dyck, experts now agreed that the painting was an unknown original. Olivia, the subject of the painting, who died in 1663, was a lady-in-waiting to queen consort Henrietta Maria. [14] She had married Endymion Porter, who was a patron of Anthony van Dyck. A Culture Show TV programme noted that the painting had not previously been published and it was the Your Paintings website that had allowed this attribution. [15]
Art UK collaborates in making the BBC Four television series Britain's Lost Masterpieces . [16]
Art UK helped the UK to become the first country in the world to offer a digital collection of publicly owned sculpture, with the first records appearing on the site from February 2019. [17] The site aimed at the time to have made 150,000 sculptures viewable by the end of 2020. [17] As of early 2023, however, the number of sculptures listed on Art UK was just over 50,000, [18] over 13,500 of which are outdoor public sculptures and monuments. [19] All of the recorded sculptures included date from the last 1,000 years.
The organisation published its first annual report on new sculpture unveilings in early 2023. The report found that "one in five statues unveiled in 2022 were dedicated to people of Black, Asian and other ethnicities, helping to redress historic imbalances of people celebrated in public art". [20] [21]
The earlier catalogues published are listed below. (Full listing available online. [22] )
Revenues generated from catalogue sales at participating collections is nearly all used for painting restoration and gallery education. The project's overall income is used to help fund upcoming catalogues, as most funding is generated from private donations.
Past Trustees
William Dobson was a portraitist and one of the first significant English painters, praised by his contemporary John Aubrey as "the most excellent painter that England has yet bred". He died relatively young and his final years were disrupted by the English Civil War.
Andy Goldsworthy is an English sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings.
The Lady Lever Art Gallery is a museum founded and built by the industrialist and philanthropist William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme and opened in 1922. The Lady Lever Art Gallery is set in the garden village of Port Sunlight, on the Wirral and one of the National Museums Liverpool.
Sir William Rothenstein was an English painter, printmaker, draughtsman, lecturer, and writer on art. Though he covered many subjects – ranging from landscapes in France to representations of Jewish synagogues in London – he is perhaps best known for his work as a war artist in both world wars, his portraits, and his popular memoirs, written in the 1930s. More than two hundred of Rothenstein's portraits of famous people can be found in the National Portrait Gallery collection. The Tate Gallery also holds a large collection of his paintings, prints and drawings. Rothenstein served as Principal at the Royal College of Art from 1920 to 1935. He was knighted in 1931 for his services to art. In March 2015 'From Bradford to Benares: the Art of Sir William Rothenstein', the first major exhibition of Rothenstein's work for over forty years, opened at Bradford's Cartwright Hall Gallery, touring to the Ben Uri in London later that year.
Art Fund is an independent membership-based British charity, which raises funds to aid the acquisition of artworks for the nation. It gives grants and acts as a channel for many gifts and bequests, as well as lobbying on behalf of museums and galleries and their users. It relies on members' subscriptions and public donations for funds and does not receive funding from the government or the National Lottery.
Philip James de Loutherbourg, whose name is sometimes given in the French form of Philippe-Jacques, the German form of Philipp Jakob, or with the English-language epithet of the Younger, was a French-born British painter who became known for his large naval works, his elaborate set designs for London theatres, and his invention of a mechanical theatre called the "Eidophusikon". He also had an interest in faith-healing and the occult, and was a companion of the confidence-trickster Alessandro Cagliostro.
The Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection is an art museum in Zürich, Switzerland. It was established by the Bührle family to make Emil Georg Bührle's collection of European sculptures and paintings available to the public. The museum is in a villa adjoining Bührle's former home. In 2021 many works were exhibited on 20-year loan in almost a whole floor of the new extension of the Kunsthaus Zürich museum. There was controversy due to suspicions that many works were looted from Jews by Nazi Germany. The foundation was managed for decades by Bührle's son Dieter, who was sentenced to a conditional prison term of 8 months in 1970 for supplying weapons to the racist apartheid regime in South Africa.
Henry Spencer Moore was an English artist. He is best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. Moore also produced many drawings, including a series depicting Londoners sheltering from the Blitz during the Second World War, along with other graphic works on paper.
Jerwood Foundation is an independent grant-making foundation in the United Kingdom. In 1999 the Jerwood Foundation established the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, a registered charity under English law.
Sheffield, England, has a large population of amateur, working and professional visual artists and artworks.
Philip Jonathan Clifford Mould is an English art dealer, London gallery owner, art historian, writer and broadcaster. He has made a number of major art discoveries, including works of Thomas Gainsborough, Anthony Van Dyck and Thomas Lawrence.
Thomas Barker or Barker of Bath, was a British painter of landscape and rural life.
The Portrait of Olivia Porter is an oil painting on canvas by Anthony van Dyck, showing Olivia, Lady Porter, the wife of Sir Endymion Porter, daughter of John Boteler, 1st Baron Boteler of Bramfield, and niece of the Duke of Buckingham, a zealous Roman Catholic and a lady in waiting to Henrietta Maria of France, queen consort to Charles I of England. It was discovered on the Your Paintings website by Bendor Grosvenor after being documented by the Public Catalogue Foundation.
Dennis William Dring was a British portraitist.
Francis Edwin Hodge was an English painter.
Vera Cuningham was a British artist. Cuningham modeled for and had relationships with fellow artists Bernard Meninsky and Matthew Smith. She lived and exhibited her works in London and Paris, where she fled with Smith at the beginning of their affair. Some of her works are in public collections in England.
The Priseman Seabrook Collection is a British-based private collection founded by the artist Robert Priseman and his wife Ally Seabrook. It is composed of three distinct categories: 21st Century British Painting, 20th and 21st Century British Works on Paper and Contemporary Chinese Works on Paper, and is a collection partner of Art UK.
The Assassination of Julius Caesar is a 1888 painting by William Holmes Sullivan which depicts the assassination of Julius Caesar at the hands of his fellow senators. The painting, like Sullivan's other works, is based on Shakespare's play the Tragedy of Julius Caesar, depicts the Act III, Scene 1, and is placed in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. A similar version by Sullivan is named Et tu Brute.
Mary Lord is a landscape painter in oil and watercolours. Leeds Art Gallery holds six of her works in its permanent collection.
Delia Mary, Lady Millar C.V.O., was the wife of the British art historian and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Sir Oliver Nicholas Millar and an art historian in her own right. A specialist in the art of the Victorian era, she was appointed Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in recognition of her services to the Royal Collection.