A Pevsner for paintings

There is a remarkable project of great enterprise and diligence in progress throughout the land — a plan to catalogue all the oil paintings (as well as those in acrylic or tempera) in national collections. This gigantic task is being undertaken by a charity called The Public Catalogue Foundation, which is publishing its findings in single volumes dedicated to different areas of the UK. The aim is to give a county-by-county account of pictures in museums and other public collections.

As I write, I have in front of me half a dozen of the Foundation’s catalogues: West Yorkshire: Leeds; Cambridgeshire: Fitzwilliam Museum; East Sussex; North Yorkshire; Suffolk and Imperial War Museum. Obviously some places are more dense with pictures than others, particularly a metropolitan centre like London. So far, the Foundation has only published The Slade and UCL and the Imperial War Museum catalogues to represent the capital’s rich and varied collections, though more volumes are forthcoming. Meanwhile, zealous researchers tally and tabulate among the dusty inventories of provincial institutions, recording their findings in this beautifully produced series of books.

Museums — particularly in these cash-strapped times, when the meagre elegant hang is favoured over the full-bodied floor-to-ceiling display — actually put on show at any one time a tiny percentage of their holdings. Members of the public can sometimes gain access to particular pictures in store, if they make an appointment sufficiently in advance, but until now it has not been possible to browse these hidden collections. The PCF’s affordable catalogues, with images printed in colour, nine to the page, offer something which is more than a thumbnail illustration, and they demonstrate the full range of a museum’s holdings. Occasionally, forgotten collections come to light. Thus the unknown Roebuck Collection (in the North Yorkshire volume), which contains a modest but interesting sampling of Modern British (among other things), emerges from the gloom.