Your Paintings is a joint initiative between the BBC, the Public Catalogue Foundation (a not-for-profit), and over 3,000 participating collections from across the United Kingdom. Resulting from the PCF’s ten-year project to digitize the UK’s entire national collection of oil paintings, Your Paintings allows users to see 80% of these paintings that are typically in storage. The vast majority had not been photographed before this project. These artworks are now free to view on the BBC’s website.

For more on the project, view the three-minute film produced by the BBC.

Your Paintings is the only website anywhere in the world illustrating a nation’s entire painting collection. There are over 210,000 oil paintings in the UK’s national collection. These publicly owned oil paintings are held in institutions ranging from museums large and small to universities, town halls, hospitals, and even fire stations. In total there are works by 36,000 artists on the site ranging from the world famous to the completely obscure. Your Paintings provides a major source of organized material for research into art history, British and international history, genealogy, and topography.

Posted in: Online Resources