Explore Britain’s Paintings Online

Your Paintings is a website which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real. It is made up of paintings from thousands of museums and other public institutions around the country.

Your Paintings is a joint initiative between the BBC, the Public Catalogue Foundation (a registered charity) and participating collections and museums from across the UK.

Over 60,000 of the 200,000 publicly-owned paintings are currently online. Critics, scholars, and artists also provide virtual guided tours, including Yinka Shonibare who discusses the art that inspires him.

 

Images of the Staffordshire Hoard on Flickr

The Staffordshire Hoard, discovered in July 2009, is the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found. Leslie Webster, former Keeper of Prehistory and Europe at the British Museum describes this discovery:

…this is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England in the seventh and early eighth century as radically, if not moreso, as the 1939 Sutton Hoo discoveries did; it will make historians and literary scholars review what their sources tell us, and archaeologists and art-historians rethink the chronology of metalwork and manuscripts; and it will make us all think again about rising (and failing) kingdoms and the expression of regional identities in this period, the complicated transition from paganism to Christianity, the conduct of battle and the nature of fine metalwork production – to name only a few of the many huge issues it raises.

A selection of quality Staffordshire Hoard images is available on Flickr. To download high resolution images for projection, choose a thumbnail and then click on the “all sizes” button above the image.