Online art project starts work in four major UK galleries

A major research project to increase public knowledge about the UK's public art collections has received a boost by successfully raising funds to begin work with four of the largest and most significant public galleries in the north of England. Thanks to generous grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the John Ellerman Foundation and the Pilgrim Trust, the National Inventory Research Project (NIRP) has teamed up with National Museums Liverpool, Manchester Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries and York Art Gallery. A new 18 month programme will research over 1,000 old master paintings held in the galleries and make them available to the public through an online database. The unique collaboration between the museum and higher education sectors is being led by experts from the University of Glasgow and is overseen by the Advisory Committee for Research on European Paintings. It will eventually publish all of the 22,000 pre-1900 Continental European oil paintings in the UK's public collections, creating an enduring public resource. The online database, called 'NICE Paintings', already contains 9,245 records meaning that, upon completion of this latest phase, researchers should be halfway to achieving their goal. As part of creating the online database, a team of trained art historians from the University of Glasgow will fully research the origin, history and attribution of each of the works.