LAST MONTH THE Department for Culture, Media and Sport, in collaboration with the Wolfson Foundation, announced grants totalling £4 million to benefit forty museums and galleries in England, the fourth such annual award by this partnership. Seven of the forty are in London, the rest being widely spaced over the country, including castles, dockyards, open-air museums, the National Football Museum (Preston) and Robert Smythson’s great gutted Wollaton Hall, near Nottingham. The grants go towards everything from redisplay and refurbishment to ‘interpretative signs’ and the provision of audio-guides. ‘Access’ is the mantra occurring throughout – physical, educational or social; all are combined, for example, in plans for the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool (granted £225,000), a rare purpose-built structure to house one man’s collection. Here, a ‘fully accessible’ entrance and reception will be made where visitors are to be ‘greeted by staff’ and whisked off, perhaps, to the new ‘flexible learning suite’ which will contain an ‘interactive “Artbase” space’ alongside opportunities to draw, follow trails and complete quizzes. All this chimes with the acceptable face of today’s museums, many of which, particularly the smaller, regional ones, are admittedly in urgent need of physical improvements (though not necessarily of expansion). But what of the collections within?

Five years ago an initiative was launched to compile an inventory of all old-master paintings in public collections in England and Wales.1 Initial funds and curatorial advice were provided by the National Gallery, London, where the scheme originated and where much fundamental groundwork was accomplished. With dwindling resources in regional collections and a dearth of up-to-date catalogues of their holdings, the project could not have been more welcome. Its focus on old-master paintings was understandable: signs have long been flashing that such works, apart from obvious masterpieces, are being neglected, are too often relegated to storerooms and are under-researched. At the same time, however, it might be argued that a far greater number of museums hold paintings made after 1900. Again, star attractions are in less danger than those works of the second rank that frequently give more modest collections their individuality. These too are often uncatalogued, rarely photographed and quickly removed when a temporary exhibition is installed or a popular themed display is arranged in the sometimes misplaced hope of meeting attendance targets that ensure local authority support or satisfy the conditions of publicly funded grants.

Two years later a separate initiative was launched entitled the Public Catalogue Foundation, the brainchild of Fred Hohler. Its chief aim, overlapping with the National Inventory, is nothing less than the compilation of as complete an index as possible of all oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom. This includes works not only in museums but also local authority, civic and municipal holdings and those in charitable foundations. The PCF announced an ambitious programme of published catalogues (rather than lists available only on-line, as was the National Inventory’s intention), sorted by county or city and reproducing each work in colour, with a basic accompanying caption and useful introductory texts on the collections. To publish these in book form (and relatively cheaply) was a bold and valuable decision. Although a number of public collections are viewable on-line, this system does not carry an illustrated book’s inducement to graze and browse, whereby significant groups of works can often be seen at a glance, and the pulse of a particular collection can be gauged quickly.

Once the PCF became aware of the National Inventory, it realised that the two projects had too much in common not to be sewn together in one concerted effort. In October 2003 they merged and, as a registered charity with public and private funding, the PCF assumed control and began its work in earnest. Since then, five catalogues have been published.2 The Foundation takes care of photography but relies on information on the paintings from the respective holding institutions. As the early catalogues demonstrate, mistakes, misattributions and erroneous titles are an unfortunate blemish, mostly the result of many collections being under-researched – as the National Inventory scheme had intimated. Luckily, corrections and additions will be made on the planned on-line versions of each volume. Such quibbles aside, the catalogues will be a source of information, discovery and pleasure, giving the public a sense of what lies beyond those revamped entrances, either on the wall or in store.

Many museums make do with marketable compilations of ‘highlights’ which suggest the range but not the depth and detail of their holdings. For the bigger picture, Mark Fisher’s Britain’s Best Museums and Galleries, published last year, could hardly be improved.3 As a former Government Minister for the Arts, Fisher is sensible to all the problems confronting museums today but is firmly on the side of scholarship and delight rather than managers and marketing. He is an enthusiastic cicerone to his choice of 350 institutions, writing about each at some length and with a touch which is both personal and objective (his sole obvious yet charming eccentricity is a passion for grandiose examples of the taxidermist’s art: see Leicester, Inverness, Tring et al.).4 His book is bound to be updated and any new edition will make a stalwart companion guide to the PCF’s accumulating volumes.

1 See the Editorial, ‘Towards a national inventory of paintings’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 142 (2000), p.543.
2 These are West Yorkshire: Leeds and Kent (both 2004), East Sussex, West Sussex and London: Slade School and UCL (all 2005). The volumes are available in hardback and paperback; further details from the PCF, 17 Buckingham Gate, London SW1E 6LB, and www.thepcf.org.uk.
3 Britain’s Best Museums and Galleries. From the Greatest Collections to the Smallest Curiosities. By Mark Fisher. 880 pp., ill. in col. throughout. (Allen Lane, London, 2004), £30. ISBN 0–713–99575–0.
4 Fisher will surely be interested in Doncaster Museum’s current exhibition, Get Stuffed: The Craft of the Taxidermist (to 30th October).