Crowd sourcing the National Trust's collection
January 4 2012
Picture: National Trust
Following my post on the new National Trust online database, the NT's registrar and blogger-in-chief, Emile de Bruijn, has written a piece for the NT's own excellent blog, and points out the great potential of the web when it comes to identifying lost paintings:
Paintings expert Bendor Grosvenor has been perusing our new online National Trust Collections database (which I first posted about here), testing his eye on various ‘school of’ and ‘attributed to’ portraits. He has reported his hunches on his Art History News blog.
For instance, he thinks that this portrait of a lady at Petworth [above], attributed to Van Dyck, really is by the artist himself, done in the mid 1620s in Italy.
This kind of response is really encouraging. It means people are now starting to use the National Trust Collections site for research and comparison. The site itself (and the National Trust’s curatorial records) will also benefit from these responses, as more information comes to light and opinions are exchanged.
Once again we see the potential of crowd sourcing – which, in the slightly rarified area of old master paintings expertise, should perhaps be called in-crowd sourcing (but an in-crowd accessible to all).
Emile has also kindly sent me a higher-res image of the portrait above; it certainly does seem like an Italian-period Van Dyck to me, albeit one that appears to have suffered a degree of damage. Now I just need to wait till Petworth reopens to go and see it 'in the flesh'...
