Art's Domesday Book

The Birmingham Post does a local interest story on the region’s art collections but reveals a fascinating–and decidedly old-fashioned–project.

The Public Catalogue Foundation’s astonishing project to publish a complete illustrated catalogue of oil, tempera and acrylic paintings in UK public collections has taken another step forward with the arrival of the Warwickshire volume.

Added to existing volumes covering Birmingham, Staffordshire (including the Black Country) and Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, it means that armchair art lovers can get a much better overview of art collections across the West Midlands than they ever could by travelling around them, given the national statistic that only one in five paintings in our museums and galleries is on display.

The Public Catalogue Foundation is both a very ambitious idea and a surprisingly old-fashioned one, in that it is being produced as a series of weighty and attractive books (27 of them so far) before it is published online. In this case around 2,000 paintings are illustrated in colour over 300 pages.

The details of what is held in the UK–both good and mediocre–is astonishing for its depth.

Unearthing Hidden Gems (Birmingham Post)