NICE Paintings – the National Inventory of Continental European Paintings

Image details: ‘La Falaise à Fécamp’ by Claude Monet, 1881 © Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum

Guest Post: Andrew Greg, Project Director, National Inventory Research Project, Department of History of Art, Univeristy of Glasgow

‘NICE Paintings’ is a pioneering database aiming to bring together in one searchable catalogue all 22,000 old master paintings in UK museums. The first phase of the project is now on line at http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/NIRP/index.php. It contains detailed records of nearly 8,000 pre-1900 Continental European oil paintings from 200 public collections across the United Kingdom. Over 2,500 are illustrated with digital colour images, and more images are being added regularly.

Although a growing number of, mainly large, museums are producing on line catalogues of their collections, most museums do not have on-line catalogues and there is no union catalogue of any aspect of UK museums’ collections that brings together all their holdings into one searchable database. In addition, it has long been recognised that smaller museums do not have access to the expertise to enable them to research their specialist collections and that this is a barrier to publicising and making full use of these collections. The project’s methodology therefore was to bring together the research skills of academic art historians and the under-researched collections of often hard-pressed museum curators.

The project devised its own Access database, on established museum documentation principles, which was provided to project researchers in the field and on which they recorded their data. The individual databases were complied by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) and mapped to VADS’ own database for web publication. We were not funded to systematically create or acquire digital images but museums have been generous with providing them where available and giving permissions. We are also very grateful to the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) and the Bridgeman Art Library for their help in providing images.

The project is aimed at everyone interested in the history of art, but will also be invaluable to teachers wanting illustrative material to teach history, geography, cultural history, and literature, mythology and bible studies material.

‘NICE Paintings’ was produced by the National Inventory Research Project (NIRP), based at the University of Glasgow. NIRP is a partnership between the University of Glasgow and Birkbeck University of London, and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Getty Foundation and the Kress Foundation.

It is managed by a steering committee of curators from national and regional collections across the UK, chaired by Dr Susan Foister, Director of Collections at the National Gallery, London. The project is continuing to add digital images to the database, contributed by museums and the Public Catalogue Foundation, and is working to complete the project by adding to the database records on the 15,000 old master paintings in national, university and other major regional museums not included in this initial research phase of the project.

Over the next few months an alternative portal to the project’s database, with enhanced search facilities, will be provided through the University of Glasgow.

URL: http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/NIRP/index.php

Contact: a.greg@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk

Tags: art history, database