For art teachers of all age groups, this makes Your Paintings a valuable teaching resource.

For history teachers, it could be an even richer resource. The UK’s national collection of oil paintings is probably the best pre-photographic visual record of UK history and society.  There are paintings showing everyday life, as well as the great historical events of the last millennium.

There are also paintings that tell us about the physical and human geography of Britain, paintings of costumes and theatrical productions, paintings of (mostly Christian) religious scenes and imagery, even scientific advances. (We haven’t found any good paintings for Maths lessons – but if you’re a Maths teacher, and find something useful, please let us know!)

With the autumn term just beginning, we are planning to publish a series of blog posts by teachers, with ideas for lessons, and links to interesting paintings that will help with classroom teaching.

Here are our first two:

• Art - Landscapes: challenging students' assumptions
• History - The Industrial Revolution

As well as these blog posts, we have guided tours of the paintings on the site, by celebrities, artists and art critics, to bring the stories behind some of the paintings to life. Subjects range from the art of war and Britain in the 20th century, to romance, Shakespeare and Roman and Greek myths and legends. And once the whole collection is digitised, there will be paintings from every part of the UK on the site.

Please let us know what you think of all these resources, ideas you have for others, and any other feedback you have on how we could improve the site to make it work better for you.

(We will be making some improvements to the site in the coming weeks and months. For example, we’ll be improving the search facility.

And we're looking forward to getting the first tags from the Your Paintings Tagger project, being run by our partners, the Public Catalogue Foundation. Your Paintings Tagger asks the general public to add tags to paintings, so that they are easier to find. We’ll be publishing a blog post in the near future, about how Tagger could be incorporated in the classroom).

Then on Monday 11th July, art historian James Fox comes to BBC Four with British Masters, arguing that we have undervalued the quality and impact of the last century of British art.

In late July, Waldemar Januszczak will examine the more radical works of The Impressionists, in a three part series for BBC Two.

All three presenters will also be featuring on Your Paintings, with Guided Tours of the nation's art collection. You can already hear James Fox talk about a selection of paintings by the British Masters, and what it tells us about twentieth century Britain.

You can also hear Alastair Sooke talking about some of the best artists whose work you can see for free, in galleries and collections around the country.

Waldemar Januszczak's tour of the Impressionists is coming soon...

Highlights include Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen tracking down a painting by a Wiltshire artist that once hung in 10 Downing Street, forgery experts scrutinising paintings by legendary Cornish mariner-turned-artist Alfred Wallis to find out if they are fake or worth a fortune, and Dan Snow discovering some paintings hidden in the middle of Sherwood Forest, that shed light on the role of the aristocracy in the First World War.

 

The full list of programmes is:

• In Liverpool and Manchester, Paul McGann on Britain's youngest war artist, and long-lost depictions of the war effort.
• In Cumbria, former Dad’s Army actor Ian Lavender on two paintings of local football matches that helped pay off a drinking debt
• Linda Barker uncovering Yorkshire's hidden paintings, including one that may have led thousands to their deaths in the First World War.
• Nick Hancock tracing the history of Midlands industry through its hidden art, starting in his home town of Stoke-on-Trent.
• Dan Snow finding paintings hidden in the middle of Sherwood Forest, that shed light on the role of the aristocracy in the First World War.
• Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen investigating a once famous painting by a Wiltshire artist that hung on the walls of 10 Downing Street.
• Meera Syal searching for hidden paintings which reveal the extraordinary story of a Norfolk Prince, son of the last Maharaja of the Punjab.
• Forgery experts scrutinising paintings by legendary Cornish mariner-turned-artist Alfred Wallis to find out if they are fake or genuine worth a fortune.
• Joe Crowley unraveling the mystery of recently discovered paintings charting Thomas Hardy's landscapes.
• A long hidden painting of a lady in a red dress that sheds light on the tangled love lives of novelist Virginia Woolf, and artist Vanessa Bell and her gay lover Duncan Grant.
• Hardeep Singh Kohli using paintings to look at a history of multicultural London spanning from the Irish migrants to the slavery-abolition movement.

Some of you may notice that these stories are only about paintings in galleries and collections in England.  Your Paintings is absolutely a UK wide project, and over the coming months paintings from across the UK will be added. However, in the initial launch, the majority of the paintings on the site are in galleries and collections in England, and so these first set of programmes cover those galleries and  collections. This reflects the practicalities of cataloguing being carried out by our partners, the Public Catalogue Foundation. We hope that in the future, once more paintings are on the site, there will be programmes from across the UK about the collection.

Currently we have only basic information about each painting on the site such as title, artist, and execution date. What we don't have is any information about the type of painting, the subjects portrayed in the paintings and the styles and movements represented. Tagging each painting will provide this information, enabling Your Paintings to be searched by users in a much more sophisticated and easily accessible manner.

By looking at the paintings in detail, 'taggers’ will be able to help generate useful subject classifications for each work and supply important keyword information such as the people, places and events shown in the painting. Each painting will be tagged a number of times and algorithms behind the scenes will calculate which tags are likely to be the most accurate. The tags will then be fed through to the Your Paintings website.

The algorithms that power Tagger have been created by the Citizen Science Alliance, based at the Astrophysics Department at the University of Oxford. They were the team behind the hugely successful Galaxy Zoo website.

If you'd like to get involved - just click here to start tagging!

More information:

- Watch a video demonstration of Tagger with artist Alison Watt
- Find out more information about tagger