There will be some fantastic additions to Your Paintings later this month.

Over 3,000 paintings from National Museums Liverpool will be joining the site. NML is made up of 8 collections including the Walker Art Gallery, Lady Lever Art Gallery and the brand new Museum of Liverpool which opened last December.

Following on from the addition of South West London to the site in December we will be adding paintings from the London Borough of Camden. So large is the number of paintings in this borough (over 4,000 works), we will be adding collections in two phases.

The first phase will include the Wellcome Library, Royal Free Hospital, Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, the London Borough of Camden collection and the Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Finally, we will be putting online the first phase of our cataloguing work with the Colleges and University of Cambridge. This will include the Kettle’s Yard collection and paintings from a variety of academic departments. It will also include the first of the College painting collections from the likes of Trinity College and St John’s College. About 20 Cambridge Colleges have agreed to participate in the project so far. These College collections are not in public ownership. However, in line with the charitable aims of these private institutions, the collections are keen to be included in order to widen public awareness and assist research and learning.

Before Christmas 3 new guided tours were added to the site – actress Penelope Keith on the National Trust, Top Gear’s James May on his favourite paintings and the Observer’s art critic Laura Cummings on self portraits.

Later on this year, alongside adding more content to Your Paintings, we will develop the My Collection feature, which will allow users to create, curate and share their favourite paintings.

Lastly, Art Detective has proved incredibly popular and we have been overwhelmed with useful information, musings and questions from the public about the paintings online. Later this year we hope to share some of these fascinating tales in our newsletter.

Laura Marriott
Operations Manager