BBC hosts Britain's public art collections online

27 June 2011

This masterpiece by Edward Burne-Jones, titled "Laus Veneris," 1873-78, from the collection of Laing Art Gallery, is viewable on the BBC's new Your Paintings website. It is also currently part of the Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition "The Cult of Beauty.

Works by John Singer Sargent, John Constable, and Andy Warhol are among the 200,000 paintings in a national collection owned by British taxpayers. Some of this art trove resides in small publicly-funded collections and others exist in relative obscurity, either stashed in museum storage or on the walls of a government building. Now a new online art gallery will host digital images of paintings from Britain's public collections.

The BBC's "Your Paintings" website, developed over six years with the Public Catalogue Foundation, currently displays online about 63,000 artworks - the first batch to be digitized.

Treasures tucked away in various corners of the country - like Pissarro's 1906 landscape of west London, which is housed in a history center - will now be seen by a wider public.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/

A vast range of artists are already included in the Beta version of the site, from Francis Bacon to Alfred James Munnings, Canaletto to Rossetti, and numerous lesser known artists.