Archives for October 2011

All Staffordshire oil paintings in public ownership have been uploaded to the Your Paintings website. The collection of around 2,500 paintings includes work by Freud, Gainsborough, Litchenstein, Lowry, Renoir and Reynolds. More than 30 collections are covered, including those in the metropolitan boroughs of Wolverhampton, Walsall and Sandwell, revealing paintings that are both on display and in store across the county. This addition of Staffordshire to the collections already on Your Paintings increases the total number of paintings to over 79,000.

Highlights from Staffordshire include:

This painting was used as a coal divider in the coal store in the 1970s until curator David Rodgers began working at the gallery. It was later restored by Jesse Brueton and is now one of the gallery’s most popular exhibits. The artist, Richard Wilson, was born in Wales. He is seen as one of the founders of English landscape painting.

The strengths of the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery lie in its collection of British early twentieth century paintings. It was a priority for the museum to support and interpret contemporary artists, which is a philosophy that still exists today. This painting is one of the gallery’s most popular paintings, and the collection also holds many diverse pieces by local artists, such as Arthur Berry.

The gallery in the Nicholson Institute in Leek is too small to hold the vast collection of paintings of the SMDC. So a majority of the collection is stored in a nuclear fallout shelter underneath the council offices. Built during the Cold War, the shelter still contains dormitories containing original bunks and shower cubicles.

Get Tagging Staffordshire

People from all around the country are invited to ‘tag’ the paintings in Staffordshire to help the BBC and Public Catalogue Foundation identify and catalogue what is in each one. The results will allow the users of the Your Paintings website to search for paintings of subjects that interest them. Tagging is easy and fun and you don’t need to be an art expert to do it. You can start right now with Your Paintings Tagger at https://tagger.thepcf.org.uk/