Positive chaos at Campbeltown Museum

Anyone stepping into Campbeltown Museum recently would have been met with an unusual sight.

All the museum’s oil paintings were off the walls and out of their frames, not for a grand spring clean but because the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) charity was in town.

The PCF is busy cataloguing and photographing all oil paintings in public collections throughout the UK – around 200,000 in total. Imagine.

Each region is to have its own fully illustrated catalogue and Scotland, where 30,000 of these paintings are located, is to be represented in 14 volumes.

The aim is to inspire people about the paintings they own and to encourage them to visit their local collections, as well as to stimulate more research and educational activities.

Each painting will be going live in 2012 in an exciting new website hosted by the BBC, YourPaintings.

Councillor Neil Mackay, Argyll and Bute’s spokesperson for Arts, Culture, Leisure and Sport, says: ‘We are very much on board this innovative project and the PCF team was impressed by the enthusiasm and commitment of local museum staff in Campbeltown as well as by the range and quality of the works of art themselves.

‘Campbeltown boasts paintings of international significance such as A Westerly Gale, Machrahanish by Scottish impressionist William MacTaggart; and Archibald Mackinnon’s The Campbeltown Fair, with its lively portrayal of Campbeltown’s Main Street full of stallholders, entertainers, family groups and animals.

‘These paintings and many others in the museum, have been enjoyed by several generations of people not just from Campbeltown and Kintyre but from across Scotland, the UK and further afield.

‘I am delighted that this project will now ensure that these important works of art are properly catalogued in a national database’.

Here is more information on the activities of The Public Catalogue Foundation,