The Public Catalogue Foundation

The Public Catalogue Foundation
Abbreviation	PCF
Formation	2003
Type	Charity
Purpose/focus	To create a complete record of the national collection of oil, tempera and acrylic paintings in public ownership and make that accessible to the public.
Location	Covent Garden, London
Region served	United Kingdom
Website	www.thepcf.org.uk

The Public Catalogue Foundation, a registered charity, is working on a project to record the UK's complete collection of oil paintings in public ownership and to make this accessible to the public through a series of affordable catalogues and, at a later stage, free Internet access.

The catalogues and resulting website will allow readers to see a colour illustration and description of every painting in the UK's national collection. This information has significant educational benefits and constitutes the building blocks for later art historical research. Revenue from catalogue sales made by collections will be dedicated to the conservation and restoration of oil paintings in their care.

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.

Catalogue series

Of the 200,000 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.

The Oil Paintings in Public Ownership series is being published by The PCF mainly on a county-by-county basis. A volume brings together from a county all the oil, acrylic and tempera paintings in 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. Since then 32 catalogues have been printed (see Publications). There will eventually be 90 catalogues in the series covering the whole of the UK, and the series is expected to be completed in 2012.

Your Paintings

The Public Catalogue Foundation is currently working with the BBC to put all of the UK's publicly-owned oil paintings online, in a section of the BBC website, Your Paintings, launched in 2011. The PCF aims to complete the digitisation of the entire national collection by mid-2012. An innovative crowdsourcing project, Your Paintings Tagger, also went online in 2011, to generate the metadata necessary to make Your Paintings fully searchable.

Publications

Catalogues published to date include:

• West Yorkshire: Leeds
• Kent
• West Sussex
• London: The Slade and UCL
• East Sussex
• Suffolk
• North Yorkshire
• Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum
• Surrey
• Norfolk
• Essex
• London: The Imperial War Museum
• London: Victoria & Albert Museum
• Hampshire: Southampton and the Isle of Wight
• Hampshire (excluding Southampton)
• Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly
• West Yorkshire (excluding Leeds)
• Staffordshire
• Government Art Collection
• Birmingham
• Nottinghamshire
• County Durham
• City of London
• Hertfordshire
• Tyne and Wear Museums
• Northumberland, Tees Valley and Tyne and Wear
• Warwickshire
• Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire
• Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire
• Derbyshire
• Dorset
• Somerset
• Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire
• East Riding of Yorkshire
• Gloucestershire and Wiltshire.

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.

Board of trustees

• Dr Fred Hohler (Chairman and Founder)
• Alan Borg
• Charles Gregson
• Robert Hiscox
• Menna McGregor
• Richard Roundell
• Dr Charles Saumarez Smith
• Graham Southern
• John Van Kuffeler
• Alison Watt OBE

External links

• The Public Catalogue Foundation
• BBC Your Paintings
• Your Paintings Tagger
• The Public Catalogue Foundation, Registered Charity no. 1096185 at the Charity Commission