Wolfson College’s Paintings go online as part of nationwide-initiative

The project, Your Paintings, is a joint initiative between the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation, and now contains over 211,000 paintings from around 3000 collections throughout the UK.

Wolfson's art collection reflects the College's principles of modernity, interdisciplinarity, multiculturalism and egalitarianism and this focus is reflected in the paintings that are available on the website, including a portrait of Sir Isaiah Berlin by Derek Hill.

Jan Scriven, Arts Administrator for Wolfson College, says: "The Wolfson Arts Society is delighted to take part in this new initiative to allow more art lovers to access our growing contemporary collection."

Members of the public are invited to help the PCF and BBC categorise the images on the website by ‘tagging' subjects and themes. An algorithm part-created by the Citizen Science Alliance based at the Astrophysics Department at the University of Oxford will calculate which of the tags are likely to be the most accurate, and will enable visitors to carry out searches across the whole website. To get involved in tagging, please visit the Your Paintings Tagger website.

Andrew Ellis, Director of the Public Catalogue Foundation, said: “No country has ever embarked on such a monumental project to showcase its entire oil painting collection online. Working with collections all over the land, this project reveals to the world the UK's extraordinary holding of oil paintings. Anyone with internet access, anywhere in the world, can now see them all, completely for free.”

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