BBC’s Your Paintings

John Constable, The Cornfield, 1826

John Constable, The Cornfield, 1826 (Photo © The National Gallery, London)

The BBC has teamed up with the Public Catalogue Foundation to launch Your Paintings, a digital library of paintings owned by national museums in Britain. Over the next two years, they expect to build a collection of 200,000 paintings (63,000 are available so far) from 3000 British collections. This includes major London museums like the National Gallery, Tate, and V&A, but the majority are smaller regional and municipal institutions.

At 944 pixels on the long dimension, the digital images on this site are more or less the right size for use in a Powerpoint presentation (vertical images are fine, but horizontal images are a little smaller than one would like).

You can read a BBC article about the Your Paintings project here.

For easy access anytime, I have placed a link to the BBC’s Your Paintings website on the VRC’s Online Resources page.

ARTstor and Firefox 5

Mozilla Firefox logoIf your preferred browser is Firefox and you have upgraded to version 5 (released earlier this week), you may find that you have problems accessing ARTstor.

ARTstor is not currently compatible with Firefox 5, but technicians are working to fix this problem. In the meantime, the folks at ARTstor advise you to uninstall version 5 and use Firefox 4 instead, or simply switch to another browser, such as Internet Explorer or Safari.

If you need help with any of this, please get in touch with me!