How Art UK provides online access to more than 500,000 artworks in British collections

In 2003, an initiative was launched at the National Gallery in London to document every oil painting held in public art collections in the United Kingdom. Surprising as it may seem, no one had ever thought to do this before. It was time to rescue many of the nation’s paintings from undeserved obscurity.

The task facing the team of researchers and photographers was monumental: not only were paintings to be found in every corner of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but they were held by nearly every public body. Ninety per cent of the UK’s national art collection is not on view but kept in storage or in institutions that do not have regular public access. About 80 per cent is housed in museums; the rest is in hospitals, universities, libraries, town halls, even schools.

Artworks can be found in places as far north as the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney, and as far south as Geevor Tin Mine, near Penzance. Added to this are paintings held in country houses owned by English Heritage and the National Trust.

It took 12 years to complete the initial project, and the outcome is a stunning visual record of the country’s heritage, consisting of 212,000 oil paintings. It is one of the greatest cultural initiatives ever undertaken and has been likened, in its egalitarian spirit, to Nikolaus Pevsner’s peerless architectural guides to the British Isles. And yet few outside the art world have ever heard of the project, which since 2016 has been known as Art UK.

‘There is no equivalent anywhere in the world,’ says CEO Andrew Ellis. ‘We are a digital-first organisation, with teams working across England, Scotland and Wales.’ In the last 10 years, the organisation has expanded its remit to include sculptures (both indoor and out), drawings, watercolours, prints and murals, and it now has more than 500,000 artworks by over 60,000 artists catalogued and free to access on its Art UK digital platform. ‘We will be over a million by year end,’ adds Ellis.

If you want to find a painting of George Eliot (Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry) see an Anish Kapoor sculpture on Middlehaven Dock in North Yorkshire, or learn more about where you can find graffiti art by Ejits or Banksy, nothing else comes close, and it communicates that information in stories with extraordinary respect and devotion to its subject.

Equally important, however, is the service Art UK provides to many cash-strapped institutions. ‘Few small museums have the resources or the money to put their collection online, so Art UK does this for them,’ says Ellis. ‘We bring together 3,500 institutions onto one platform that can be accessed globally. The economic benefits of sharing scale and technology with all these collections are hugely powerful.’

This service is vital in the context of the recent scandal at the British Museum, where it was discovered that precious artefacts had gone missing, later turning up on eBay. The outrage exposed a sizeable uncatalogued collection, which was the direct result of underfunding. ‘Art UK is a very good audit of where things are,’ says Ellis. ‘However, given the many millions of artworks, principally on paper, still to be documented, we have a long way to go.’

One of the charity’s great successes has been its online forum Art Detective, enabling curators to appeal to the public to help solve art mysteries. It tapped into the high drama of the BBC TV series Britain’s Lost Masterpieces and had some real triumphs.

In 2018, for example, Old Master specialist Fergus Hall posted his suspicions that a portrait in Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery depicting a member of the Spanish royal family might be by Anthony van Dyck. Numerous experts joined in the discussion that followed, including the art restorer Simon Gillespie and Britain’s Lost Masterpieces co-presenter Bendor Grosvenor.

‘It worked in a wonderfully collaborative and genial way,’ says Ellis. ‘The amount of time people put into research was quite extraordinary.’

The painting in question, The Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566-1633), was eventually confirmed to be by the Flemish artist. ‘Such a discovery can have a dramatic effect on the standing of a collection,’ says Ellis.

Art Detective has also been used to identify sitters and provenance: in 2021, the National Museum Cardiff appealed to the public to identify a young woman in a portrait by Augustus John. The sitter was eventually revealed to be the bohemian writer and anarchist Greville Texidor, a darling of the English avant-garde who fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War before emigrating to Australia.

Such discoveries make for great stories, but they don’t pay the bills. ‘We have had to pause the Art Detective site, because funding is challenging and our team is small,’ says Ellis. ‘We have to be strategic about what we put our resources into.’

Christie’s has historically given financial support to Art UK, and in 2023 the Christie’s Education Trust began making an annual donation to the charity.

Art UK’s current focus is on the next generation, promoting visual literacy in schools. ‘Our goal is to develop young people’s confidence to critically observe, using art as the starting point,’ says Ellis. Its new initiative, The Superpower of Looking, creates resources to help teachers nurture a love of art in their students whilst improving their visual literacy. It has already been rolled out to 8 per cent of UK primary schools.

Art UK 2024 patron Bob and Roberta Smith — pseudonym of the artist Patrick Brill — is passionate about the project. ‘We know that within schools, the arts have been diminished,’ he says. ‘If you don’t have the arts in your DNA, then that’s quite a difficult subject to teach.’

A lifelong campaigner, the artist believes that creativity is integral to society, and considers Art UK’s core remit, to democratise access to the UK national art collection, as crucial. ‘It makes people powerful when you understand things, and it is all about looking.’ Ellis agrees: ‘We have the ambition to connect every young person with the extraordinary art they own.’

‘In many ways, Art UK has a very simple mission,’ adds Ellis. ‘To ensure art is not the preserve of the few, but the many.’

Christie’s Education Trust is a proud supporter of Art UK