Welcome to Your Oil Paintings

View the UK's national collection of oils without leaving home.

Aiming to bring some 200,000 works from the UKs national collection of oil paintings online, the BBC has launched Your Paintings with an initial upload of 63,000 pieces. The oils currently catalogued online represent the works of 15,000 artists from 860 collections. To give a sense of the projects massive scale, the National Gallery in London has approximately 2,300 oil paintings in its collection, so the national collection is essentially 100 times larger in sum.Included in the 200,000 works from artists both famous and virtually unknown will be tempura and acrylic paintings as well. A focus on oils was twofold: oil was the preferred medium of artists for hundreds of years, and while there are millions of watercolors and drawings in the national collection, 200,000 is a more practical number in terms of cataloging an entire collection online.The greatest feature of this ambitious project is of course the unprecedented access to art that it will provide to billions of people around the world. At any given time up to 80% of the UKs national collection of oil paintings are not on public display, due to repairs, limited display space, or other reasons. By bringing everything oil online, the works will always be available for art aficionados and general appreciation. And if you decide to pitch in with the tagging process, Your Paintings will truly begin to feel your own.