The UK's Oil Painting Collection

The United Kingdom holds in its galleries and civic buildings arguably the greatest publicly owned collection of oil paintings in the world. 210,000 publicly owned oil paintings are held in institutions ranging from museums large and small to town halls, universities, hospitals and even fire stations.

However, four in five of these paintings are not on view. Whilst many galleries make strenuous efforts to display their collections, many paintings across the country are held in storage, usually because there are insufficient funds and space to show them. Furthermore, very few galleries have created a complete photographic record of their paintings, let alone a comprehensive illustrated catalogue of their collections. In short, what is publicly owned is not publicly accessible. 

The PCF's Work

Over the past ten years the PCF has been photographing these paintings and collating information about each painting. In doing this it has been working closely with collections up and down the country. It expects to complete the digitisation programme by late 2012, when it will have recorded 210,000 paintings from over 2,800 collections.

Putting the Project Online

Until recently, the PCF’s main focus was publishing a series of hard copy catalogues. Now its focus has turned to publishing online. Online access allows users to search paintings by various criteria and view larger images, whilst collections will be able to update their painting records. Most importantly, it gives the PCF’s work a much larger and wider audience.

To achieve this aim, the PCF entered into a partnership with the BBC to build the Your Paintings website which was launched in June 2011. Together the two organisations are radically improving the public’s awareness of the oil paintings they own but, in most cases, cannot see.