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NATIONAL INVENTORY OF EUROPEAN PAINTINGS

supported by THE NATIONAL GALLERY                     

Pilgrim Trust research grants - next deadline 30 April

The end of April is the deadline for the next round of applications for these grants. They will be advertised in the April Museums Journal.

These 100% grants can pay the costs of travel and accommodation in London or elsewhere researching your collection of Continental paintings, for example using the facilities of the National Gallery, the Courtauld Institute etc. They can cover the cost of back-filling posts in your absence, or the fees and expenses of a researcher working on your behalf. You can collaborate with other museums in your region to make up a consortium to research a group of small collections. For more information contact the Project Director and for application information contact Susan Foister at the National Gallery (see addresses on right).

Regional Hubs and the National Inventory project

If you work for potential regional hubs or are involved in putting in a bid for regional hub status, don't forget that the National Inventory project is already working towards several of the expectations that Resource has of the hub network. The project was featured in Renaissance in the Regions as good example of collaboration between national and regional museums. A hub could make a valuable contribution by, for example, co-ordinating the regional research work necessary for the National Inventory or hosting its database in its website.

Examples of the work the regional hubs will be expected to do include

• "Nurturing the research and scholarship essential for interpreting collections and making them accessible."

• Implementing high standards of collections management."

• Leading on museum collection surveys"

• Carrying out joint projects with national museums and galleries

Your support for the National Inventory project will help you be seen to meet those expectations. 

Newsletter 4, July 2002

NATIONAL INVENTORY OF EUROPEAN PAINTINGS

supported by THE NATIONAL GALLERY                       
 

Project now includes Scotland

Following the welcome endorsement of the Project by the National Galleries of Scotland, we have now extended our remit to include public collections north of the border. The Project is now truly UK-wide. There have already been strong expressions of support from major Scottish public collections such as Aberdeen, Dundee, the Hunterian at Glasgow, Perth and the Smith Art Gallery, Stirling.

Getty grant

A grant application has now been made to the Getty Grant Program. There will be a delay of up to six months before we hear the result but we are optimistic of a favourable response. The application is to enable the Project to employ researchers to work on the regional collections most in need of help, to bring their research and documentation up to a minimum standards required by the Project.  Additional funds will be required to manage this work and create a basic database (see University partnership, below).

University partnership to further research

The Project is to enter a partnership with four of the UK's leading University history of Art Departments to further the research programme and create the Project database. Birkbeck College, Glasgow University, Leicester University and the Open University have agreed to collaborate with the Project on making joint grant applications to funds within the HE sector such as the Arts and Humanities Research Board. These applications will be made in the autumn. This partnership will manage a team of researchers specially recruited by the Project with the aid of the Getty grant to work on regional collations and will create the basic Project database. The database is intended then to be made available through VADS, the Visual Arts Data Service, which already hosts, for example, the Imperial War Museum's Art Collections database. The necessary illustration of this database with images will involve an expensive programme of photography and digitisation that will be the subject of additional fundraising in the future.

The Project is extremely grateful to the staff of the above institutions for their enthusiasm for the project.
 

Newsletter 5, January 2003

NATIONAL INVENTORY OF EUROPEAN PAINTINGS

supported by THE NATIONAL GALLERY, London    

Getty grant

The application made last summer to the Getty Grant Program has now been considered. The Getty and its external reviewers are very supportive of the project and are in principle willing to offer a grant, subject to reassurance about the level of technical support available to the project's management team. We hope that the involvement of the Visual Arts Data Service in providing technical support and in hosting the project's database and publishing it through their portal (see below) will be sufficient to reassure the Getty.

AHRB grant and university partnership

In partnership with Birkbeck College, London, and Glasgow University the National Inventory project has submitted a grant application to the Arts and Humanities Research Board. This will enable the project to employ researchers to work on priority regional collections and to begin the compilation of the database. Technical assistance has been and will be provided by the Visual Arts Data Service, who will publish the database via their portal (http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/). Glasgow University has kindly and generously agreed to house the project in the History of Art Department, at no cost. The National Gallery will generously continue to fund me part time until Getty and AHRB funding comes on stream.

We are currently preparing further applications to the AHRB and others to allow for the incorporation of databases of collections already well researched, such as those of the national and university museums, and to support the photography and digitisation necessary to adequately illustrate the database.

The role of Regional Hubs

With funding for the National Inventory at a premium, collection research for the Inventory will be prioritised on smaller collections, i.e. those most in need of the specialist help we will be able to provide. Researchers will be based at a number of major regional museums with the support of Regional Hubs. There has already been a very supportive response so far from several Hub leaders towards the project.

There has been recognition of the part the project could play in the Hubs' responsibilities for supporting scholarship and collection management, improving provision of public information and developing strategic approaches to collecting. There is also the potential for the Inventory to promote regional collections by providing regional interfaces to the Inventory's database and other regional links.

Newsletter 6, April 2003

NATIONAL INVENTORY OF EUROPEAN PAINTINGS

supported by THE NATIONAL GALLERY, London       
 

Getty Grant awarded

We are delighted to announce that the Getty Grant Program has offered £210,000 towards the cost of research for the National Inventory project. This grant will go wholly towards researcher salaries. However we still need the AHRB Research grant in order to fund travel and subsistence, IT costs and management of the project. We will hear about this in May. A successful AHRB application will enable the project to recruit researchers and an administrator in the summer and for the project to begin in October.
 

Pilgrim Trust grants

The next round of Pilgrim Trust grants will be advertised in the mid-April Museums Journal Recruitment Supplement. These grants enable curators to undertake research work on their foreign paintings in support of the National Inventory project. Alternatively curators can appoint their own qualified researchers to carry out this work. Applications from consortia of neighbouring museums are encouraged. Salaries, travel expenses and photography costs can be covered by the grants, which require no matching funding from museums. For further details contact Ruth Crawley at the National Gallery.

Neil MacGregor Scholarships

In April's Museums Journal, the National Gallery are announcing the creation of the Neil MacGregor Scholarships. These will enable young art historians to be trained by the National Gallery in picture examination and photography and to work on one or more groups of pictures in regional collections. Those museums with potentially suitable collections are being contacted separately by the Project Director and invited to host a Neil MacGregor scholar. The first scholarships will be awarded in the summer of 2003 and will begin work in the autumn. Their work will contribute to the quality of the collection data to be collected by the National Inventory project. Further information about the scholarships is obtainable from Ruth Crawley at the National Gallery.

The Public Catalogue Foundation

Some of you may by now have heard of the Public Catalogue Foundation, which was launched at the National Gallery on 27 March. This not-for-profit charitable corporation intends to raise sponsorship to publish fully illustrated catalogues of all the oil paintings in UK public collections. NIEP has had constructive talks with the PCF and there are several opportunities for us to benefit from one another's work. We will continue to work closely to ensure there is no duplication of effort.

Newsletter 7, Nov. 2003

supported by THE NATIONAL GALLERY, London         

Merger with Public Catalogue Foundation

NIEP has been renamed the National Inventory Research Project  (NIRP) following the successful negotiation of a merger with the Public Catalogue Foundation, a charitable company which intends to publish illustrated catalogues of all oil paintings in public ownership in the U.K. Given the overlaps in aims and methodology between the two projects a merger was essential to minimise demands on museum staff and to rationalise and co-ordinate the two projects' management, data gathering and fundraising. The aims of the NIEP project are protected within the new organisation and the long-term future of the resulting combined database is ensured. Our project is well represented at Board and Advisory Panel level within the new organisation. The existing project Steering Committee, enhanced by representatives from the AHDS, Birkbeck College and Glasgow University, will retain control of the research programme and its funding. We are confident that the merger will ensure the closest collaboration between these two ambitious and complementary projects.

Funding applications: AHRB and others

Unfortunately our application for research funding to the AHRB was unsuccessful. We are resubmitting a smaller and slightly revised application to the AHRB Resource Enhancement fund in November. In the meantime we are making applications to trusts for funds to enable us to utilise the grant awarded by the Getty Grant Program.

Pilgrim Trust grants

The most recent round of Pilgrim Trust grants were advertised in October. The next round will be advertised in the April Museums Journal. These grants enable curators to undertake research work on their foreign paintings in support of the National Inventory project. Alternatively curators can appoint their own qualified researchers to carry out this work. Applications from groups of museums are encouraged. Salaries, travel expenses and photography costs can be covered by the grants, which require no matching funding from museums. For further details contact Susan Foister at the National Gallery.

Project Office at the University of Glasgow

The Project Director is now occupying the project office generously provided by the History of Art Department at the University of Glasgow for two days a week. However the existing addresses and numbers will remain active and effective. Important telephone calls should be made to 0141 330 8519 on Mondays and Thursdays and to 0141 423 7081 at all other times.

Questionnaire report

NATIONAL INVENTORY OF EUROPEAN PAINTINGS

Report on the findings of the Research Questionnaire. Revised version 02.08.01.

The Questionnaire

250 questionnaires were sent out in February and March 2001.  They were sent to public museums and galleries in England and Wales with previously identified ‘Old Master' paintings (e.g. in C. Wright, 1976) and to the great majority of museums in the Museums Yearbook that identified paintings as being part of their collection. The National Trust and English Heritage made one response each on behalf of all their collections, as did the larger local museum services. 122 reminders were sent in early April to those first contacted in February.
 

Response

169 (68% of the 250) completed questionnaires were returned by the 1 August 2001. Responses came from the largest and the smallest institutions, from the National Trust, English Heritage, V & A, the Fitzwilliam, the Ashmolean and the Bowes Museum, and from numerous small local history museums with no, or only one or two, relevant pictures. Some of the analyses below include institutions with no relevant pictures but which nevertheless made meaningful returns. In addition 26 institutions with no relevant pictures returned completely blank questionnaires or otherwise responded in the negative, giving a good total response rate of 195 out of 250 (78%). The sample is therefore biased towards larger museums, which are more likely to include relevant paintings. The analyses will be amended in the light of late returns, but conclusions are unlikely to change significantly.

Collection size

51 of the 195 (26%) recorded no Continental School paintings. By including inferred information from other sources we can estimate very approximately the total number of likely pictures to be included in NIEP.

Table 1. Size of relevant collections

This total is somewhat in excess of the original estimate, and will be reflected in the analysis of research time required.

Computerisation

148 of the 169 respondents (88%) already use or are soon to use a computerised database. 35 of the 169 are not at present using any computerised databases.  21 of these 33 (12% of all respondents) say they do not intend to computerise in the near future.

Table 2. Computerisation, by size of collection, all respondents

Unfortunately only 127 responding institutions were asked the important question of what proportion of their collection was computerised. Those replying 99% have had their honesty rewarded by being amalgamated with the 100%-ers. Predictably a larger proportion of the larger institutions have 99-100% of their collection computerised than smaller ones. 

Table 3. Percentage of collection computerised

34 different database applications are in use or planned to be used by the 148 institutions that use or are about to use a computerised database. The figures refer to applications in use or about to be adopted. Databases in use by at least one collection with over 50 relevant pictures are in bold; those in use by a collection with over 200 relevant pictures are in italics.

Table 4. Databases in use
 

The implications for the project's data gathering process are that we should probably develop systems to automatically compile information from highlighted softwares (but n.b. V. & A. uses its own in-house system). Smaller collections might more efficiently be compiled manually without resorting to special systems.

Photography

These figures are very approximate due to ambiguities in the questionnaire. 

Table 5. Number (%) of institutions with % of collections photographed and % of photos digitised, all respondents

 The majority of institutions have less than half their collections photographed; a small but significant minority have most of their collection photographed and digitised. But this remains a problem area for the Inventory project. Photography and digitisation of at least the most significant objects must be tackled with additional funding.

Future prospects

As NIEP is likely to take 3 years to implement we need to look at institutions' ambitions in the near future. For planning purposes it is useful to chart database use and future prospects against size of their relevant collection:

Table 6. Future prospects, by collection size, all respondents

 Computerising and digitisation is clearly a priority for the great majority of collections and this will help the project. A smaller majority have ambitions to put, not necessarily all, their collections on the web. At least 65% of respondents have a museum website of some sort; many of these are part of their local authority's site.

Help requested

Table 7. Help requested, by size of collection, all respondents

 By far the largest proportion of respondents requested help with research, which confirms the assumption of the project. Photography is also strongly requested. As noted in the comments on Table 4, photography and digitisation will be a problem the project will need to tackle for the success of the Inventory itself. Only a small proportion of museums, though significantly higher in the larger institutions, requested cover to enable staff to do their own research. This supports the disappointing initial response to the research grants: we can infer that smaller museums do not have staff who feel themselves qualified to do the necessary research even if they were given the time to do it.

Hosting of researchers

Table 8. Those with relevant collections willing to host researchers etc.

The high proportion willing to host regional researchers is very encouraging and supports the idea of the project proactively placing researchers in the regions to carry out research at a local level. A significant minority were willing to consider acting as regional research centres, including working with local universities, despite the vagueness of the question.

Andrew Greg

Project Director, National Inventory of European Paintings

02.08.01
 

(c) Trustees of the National Gallery, London 2001