Your Paintings - About

There are an estimated 200,000 oil paintings in the UK's national collection. To give a sense of the scale of the collection, the National Gallery in London has around 2,300 oil paintings. So it's nearly one hundred times the size of that.

The collection includes works by some of the greatest painters of the last 700 years, as well as paintings by thousands of lesser known artists. It offers a remarkable insight into the history, landscape and culture of the United Kingdom.

Your Paintings is a work in progress. The BBC’s partner, the Public Catalogue Foundation, is currently over half way through the massive digitisation programme needed to photograph and document all the paintings. But rather than wait until the entire collection is documented, which will be late 2012 at the earliest, we preferred to launch the site now, with those paintings that are ready.

More paintings will be added each month through to expected completion at the end of 2012. If your area isn’t covered yet, you can sign up for our email newsletter to get updates of which regions are being added when.

Paintings owned by the state and local authorities together with those held in charitable trusts for the benefit of the public make up the national collection shown on the Your Paintings website. In addition, a small number of important collections that are not in public ownership nor normally open to the public are also being included. For example this will include paintings in Bishop’s palaces and Oxford and Cambridge Colleges.

Local authority and national museum collections make up the majority of the institutions represented. Paintings held by universities, hospitals, town halls, local libraries and even a lighthouse are also on the site. The site also includes collections held by national organisations such the National Trust, English Heritage, the Government Art Collection and Arts Council England.

At any one time around 80% of the paintings in the national collection are not on public display. They might be being conserved or repaired, be in storage (because of limited display space), or be in a part of a building that the public cannot easily access.

Where we can, we’ve identified exactly where you can see a painting, but in many cases the paintings are moved around too frequently for us to keep accurate information. In these cases, if you really want to see a painting, it’s important to check with the relevant gallery or collection before making your visit.

We expect that all oil paintings in the national collection will eventually be listed on this site. However, at launch there are, in a few of the regions represented, a very small number of collections that chose not to have their collections shown online.

For almost all of the paintings on the site there will be a photograph. Where there is not a photograph this may be because the painting was not available at the time of photography - either because it was being restored or, in a few instances, was missing. Alternatively, the lack of photograph might be for copyright reasons.

Actually it is not just oil paintings. We have also included works painted in tempera and acrylic. Tempera is an egg-based pigment that predates oil paints, so many of these paintings are the oldest in the collection. Acrylic is a more modern synthetic paint. Paintings including mixed media that includes oil or acrylic have also been included.

Your Paintings focuses on oil painting for two reasons. First, because oil was the preferred medium of most well-known artists for hundreds of years. Secondly, whilst the number of watercolours and drawings in the national collection is in the millions, the size of the oil painting collection is a practical proposition to digitise in its entirety.

Where paintings are missing or have been stolen, the best possible photograph on record has been reproduced. In some cases this may be black and white.

When paintings are being conserved or repaired, they may have conservation tissue attached to the painting surface. These were not removed when the paintings were photographed, as that would have damaged the paintings.

The core data about individual paintings and collections on the site comes from the BBC’s partner on the project, the Public Catalogue Foundation. The Public Catalogue Foundation in turn collects this information from the galleries and collections that own the paintings.

Tags displayed on the site providing keywords and subject classifications for paintings are generated by the Your Paintings Tagger initiative. You can find out more about the Tagger project, including how to take part, at the PCF’s website.

Some of the information about artists birth and death dates comes from ULAN (the Union List of Artists Names ®), under licence from the J. Paul Getty Trust.

The BBC and The Public Catalogue Foundation are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others. All images are covered by the BBC's standard terms and conditions.

Each image is also protected with a secure invisible digital watermark that allows the Public Catalogue Foundation and other copyright owners to identify and track any unauthorized use of the image.

The Public Catalogue Foundation is responsible for seeking permission to show works on the Your Paintings website from the museums and other collections that own the paintings, as well as from the artists and estates where the underlying works are still in copyright. Any queries regarding permissions should be addressed to the PCF. Please see the Public Catalogue Foundation's website for more information.