"If there's something that needs to be done, and no-one else is doing it, you damn well get out there and do it yourself"
Fred Hohler on why he founded the Public Catalogue Foundation, in 2003, with a mission to photograph the entire UK national collection of 210,000+ oil paintings and archive them online for the world to enjoy.
10 years later and I have had the the pleasure of publicising the completed BBC Your Paintings website, celebrated with a month of events and exhibitions at galleries and museums across the country this February. It was very much a return to my art history roots. Much of our time was spent contacting local galleries and museums about the stories behind paintings in their collection, then reporting the news to various media.
They included the discovery of a new painting by Anthony Van Dyck at the Bowes Museum in County Durham. Having been photographed in storage, the picture was originally thought to have been a copy until it was spotted on the Your Paintings website by art historian Dr Bendor Grosvenor who is an expert on the Dutch 16th century painter and court favourite of Charles I. The process of correctly identifying the artist formed the basis of an entire Culture Show special, broadcast on 8 March 2013. You can read the full story on the BBC website here.
The next step for Your Paintings is to tag all 210,000+ paintings with information that will enable people to easily search the archive. To speed up this lengthy process, the Public Catalogue Foundation has decided to crowd-source the work with an innovative 'Tagger' website developed in partnership with Oxford and St Andrews Universities. Whether you think you like art history or not, I can highly recommend you give it a go. It's like a having a free lesson in how to think about a painting, by just taking the time to look at it more closely that you might do otherwise. The clue is often in the title; just through searching the name of a sitter in a portrait or of an artist I've had great fun unraveling pockets of history about which I'd never have known. You don't have to go to this depth of analysis though, at the most simple level you can just label everything that you see.
As with Google image search, there's also great fun to be had thinking of a word - such as moustache or umbrella - and seeing what comes up when you search the Your Paintings database for it. The more paintings are tagged, this better this resource becomes.
This brings me to the real stroke of genius in the whole project. By partnering with the BBC to host the archive, Your Paintings has given itself a huge advantage in search engine optimisation. It won't be long before this website will be in the top 5 results every time that you type in the name of an artist.
This brings me to the real stroke of genius in the whole project. By partnering with the BBC to host the archive, Your Paintings has given itself a huge advantage in search engine optimisation. It won't be long before this website will be in the top 5 results every time that you type in the name of an artist.
So what does the Public Catalogue Foundation do now? As well as an education programme allied to the website, there's talk of a national collection of statues to be archived, and with the current advances in 3D imaging technology and photography. I can't wait to see how that turns out.
