"Connections" celebrates launch of center’s online catalogue

The Yale Center for British Art has launched a redesigned website (britishart.yale.edu) featuring an online catalogue of its holdings, which comprise the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside of the United Kingdom.

In celebration of the new online catalogue — which is searchable and allows free downloads of the center’s art objects in the public domain — the center is hosting an exhibition titled “Connections,” illustrating the wide variety of items in the museum’s holdings.

Online catalogue

The launch of the center’s online catalogue dovetails with Yale’s recent announcement of its “Open Access” policy, which makes digital images of items from the University’s vast cultural heritage collections that are in the public domain openly and freely available.

Visitors to the museum’s website will be able to search across the Yale Center for British Art’s entire collection of paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, rare books, manuscripts and works in the Reference Library. In addition, they will be able to download high-resolution images of objects in the public domain, free of charge.

“The new site provides the foundation for the center’s ongoing commitment to the development of an online research environment for the history of British art, and offers broad, international public access to our magnificent collections for study and pleasure in the most open of ways,” says Amy Meyers, director of the Yale Center for British Art.

“When our institution’s founder, Paul Mellon (Yale College Class of 1929), enabled all visitors to enjoy our collections and programs free of charge, in perpetuity, he set a precedent for the generosity of spirit that drives our current project,” she adds.

In late 2008, the center created the Department of Collections Information and Access to begin the process of developing an online catalogue of its art collections, comprising approximately 2,000 paintings; 200 sculptures; 20,000 drawings and watercolors; and 31,000 prints. In addition, the center houses 35,000 rare books and manuscripts and an Archive and Reference Library with more than 40,000 volumes. The vast majority of the institution’s holdings were the gift of Mellon, considered the greatest single collector of British art of the 20th century.

The catalogue includes basic “tombstone” information for the complete paintings and sculpture collection, as well as drawings and prints by key artists, including George Stubbs, Paul Sandby, Thomas Rowlandson, William Blake, Thomas Girtin, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable and Samuel Palmer. The online collection will be updated regularly until the entire prints and drawings collection is represented, and will be augmented by records on new acquisitions.

Over the coming years, full provenance, bibliography, and exhibition history will be added to the online catalogue.

Ultimately, the center plans to marry its online holdings with those of institutions beyond Yale, enabling users to engage in searches across the topic of British art internationally.

New website

In addition to the online catalogue, the redesigned website features a user-friendly online calendar that meshes with the University’s events calendar. The site will includes practical resources for planning a visit and the ability to use sharing features such as RSS feeds, email subscriptions, Facebook and calendar notifications. The website will continue to be amplified; future developments will include an expanded conservation section showing before-and-after treatments of artworks and highlights in technical art history. Additionally, the site will feature a program of online publications and educator resources.

“Connections” exhibit

“Connections,” on view through Sept. 11, mirrors the experience of the new online catalogue by drawing from across the center’s collections. The exhibit includes more than 200 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, rare books and manuscripts that are installed on the third floor in 10 thematic, period and monographic bays ranging from the early 17th to the early 20th century.

Subjects include “British Art in the 1630s”; “Hogarth and History”; “Paul Sandby”; “Sporting Art”; “George Stubbs”; “Thomas Gainsborough”; “The Academy and the Body”; “Egypt”; “Samuel Palmer”; and “British Modernism in the 1930s.”

The Yale Center for British Art, located at 1080 Chapel St., is open to the public free of charge Tuesday-Sunday. Click here for hours and directions.