Public Catalogue Foundation - Your Paintings

The Public Catalogue Foundation worked 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 completed the digitisation of the entire national collection and celebrated their success in February 2013. An innovative crowdsourcing project, Your Paintings Tagger, also went online in 2011, to generate the metadata necessary to make Your Paintings fully searchable.

In March 2013 the BBC revealed that an unknown painting by Antony Van Dyck had been discovered because of the Your Paintings web site. The painting of Olivia, wife of Endymion Porter had been discovered on-line and although it was previously thought it to be in the style of the Van Dyck, experts now agreed that the painting was an unknown original. Olivia, the subject of the painting, who died in 1663 was a Lady in Waiting to Queen consort Henrietta Maria. She had married Endymion Porter who was a patron of Antony Van Dyke. A Culture Show TV programme noted that these paintings had not previously been published and it was the Your Paintings web site that had allowed this attribution.

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