Art UK
Art UK is a cultural, education charity in the United Kingdom, previously known as the Public Catalogue Foundation. Since 2003 it has digitised over 220,000 paintings by over 40,000 artists and is now expanding the digital collection to include UK public sculpture. 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 40,000 painters held in over 3,000 collections are now on the website. The catalogues and website allow readers to see an illustration, normally in colour, and short description of every painting in the UK's national collections. This information has significant educational benefits and constitutes the building blocks for later art historical research. 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. 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". 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.' Catalogue series. 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). Collaboration with BBC. 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. 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. A section of the BBC website, "Your Paintings", was launched in 2011. The PCF completed the digitisation of the entire national collection and celebrated their success in February 2013. An innovative crowdsourcing project, "Your Paintings Tagger", also went online in 2011, to generate the metadata necessary to make "Your Paintings" fully searchable. The high-quality 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, wife of 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. 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. Art UK collaborates in making the BBC Four television series "Britain's Lost Masterpieces". Sculpture project. Art UK aims for 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. The site aims  to have made 150,000 sculpture viewable by the end of 2020. All of the recorded sculptures included date from the last 1,000 years. Book catalogues. The earlier catalogues published are listed below. (Full listing available online.) 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.