Art Detective is go!
May 5 2014
Picture: Art Detective
I'm very pleased to be able to tell you about Art Detective, a new website created by the Public Catalogue Foundation to help discover more about the UK's collection of publicly owned oil paintings. The site, which is refreshingly easy to use, allows curators, for example, to upload an image of a painting they have a query on, and ask not only a panel of experts for information about it, but everyone in the world.
Of the over 200,000 pictures in the UK's collection, some one in five has either no attribution or an uncertain attribution. For thousands more we have other questions, such as where is the landscape, who is the sitter, and so on. Art Detective is designed to help solve some of these mysteries, and will prove a valuable support for institutions struggling to open up their collections to expertise in these days of increasing funding constraints. You can read more about the initiative in today's Guardian which, very nicely, gives me a little plug:
The effort to identify the paintings is being thrown open because many of the owners, including small museums and institutions such as the Scottish Police College – which wants to know more about a fireman struggling through the snow carrying a child – have no resident curators, access to specialist knowledge or funds for research. The project has the backing of Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery. "Art Detective should provide a central exchange and a podium where expertise can be shared, problems can be aired and discoveries can be publicised," he said.
Interested members of the public already contribute along with distinguished historians including Bendor Grosvenor, himself renowned as an art detective – he recently found a portrait of Bonny Prince Charlie that had been lost for centuries – and Professor Martin Kemp of Oxford University, a world expert on the work of Leonardo da Vinci.
Any mystery painting with a splash of salt water is a magnet to Pieter van der Merwe, from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, who recently suggested, just from looking at hazily depicted flags, that a fleet of tall ships – artist, date and location unknown to the Russell-Cotes gallery in Bournemouth – might represent the fourth battle of Cape St Vincent on 5 July 1833.
The discussions are drawing out some arcane information. Argument is rumbling about the date of a portrait of a soppy looking boy standing at a piano – the child prodigy Frederick Jewson, owned by the Royal Academy of Music – and whether the flamboyant carpet suggests an interior in Edinburgh, London, Paris or Russia.
Now, more plugging - I confess to feeling a little pride in seeing Art Detective finally go live. I was kindly asked to be on the steering panel for the project, and will also be the group leader for British 16th and 17th Century portraiture. Regular readers may also remember that I've been suggesting something like Art Detective for some years now, first at a conference on deaccessioning in 2011, and also in, amongst other places, this Museums Etc. book.
Most of all though, I'm proud that it's the UK which is leading the way in projects like this. Art Detective is the world's first professionaly created art historical crowd-sourcing project. How cool is that? The PCF and the site's designers have done a terrific job, as has the Arts Council, which as paid for it (and how good to see the state at last recognising the amazing work the PCF has done so far in photographing the UK's collection, all of which was privately funded). So what lost treasures will you be able to help find?
Update - a reader writes:
Brilliant!!! Even for those of us who cannot contribute special expertise, what fun....
