Art UK is the online home for every public art collection in the United Kingdom. The website contains artworks belonging to over 3,400 British institutions, where they are made available for free – for enjoyment, learning and research. 

Art Detective aims to improve our knowledge of this vast public art collection by connecting those institutions with specialists and members of the public. From contributing small updates to uncovering major new attributions, you can help us to improve our knowledge of the nation's art!

Join us on Wednesday 2 February 2022, 3–5pm on Teams.

Speakers: Dr Bendor Grosvenor, Professor Emerita Lou Taylor, Mr Kieran Owens, Mr Andrew Greg and Dr Marion Richards

Bendor Grosvenor

Dr Bendor Grosvenor is an art historian, and specialises in British portraiture from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. He presents Britain’s Lost Masterpieces for the BBC, and writes for The Art Newspaper. 

Lou Taylor 

Lou Taylor is Professor Emerita of Dress and Textile History at the University of Brighton and an international authority on dress and textiles in their historical, cultural and social contexts. She serves on the editorial boards of specialist journals and has worked with museums, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum. Amongst her best known books are The Study of Dress History and Exhibiting Dress History, 2002 and 2004, Manchester Univ. Press and, with Marie McLoughlin, Paris Fashion and World War Two- global diffusion and Nazi Control 2019, Bloomsbury Press. 

Kieran Owens

Educated in the late 1970s and early 1980s at Trinity College, Dublin, Kieran joined the Board of the university's Douglas Hyde Gallery as a student representative. From 1984 he was co-publisher and latterly editor, until 2008, of The Event Guide, Dublin's fortnightly free-distribution cultural newspaper. He was a board member and Chair of the Board of the Project Arts Centre and returned to the Douglas Hyde Gallery as a Board member for fifteen years, chairing it up to the end of his final term in 2016. Following several years of working on freelance projects with the artists' print studio Stoney Road Press, he was appointed as the cultural programme curator for several historic properties in the care of Ireland's Office of Public Works. He is currently a member and Chair of the Board of Graphic Studio Dublin. An avid supporter of Art UK, he has been a long-standing contributor to its Art Detective research facility. 

Andrew Greg

Andrew Greg studied art history and spent 25 years as a fine art curator and museum manager in regional museums in the West Midlands and North East of England. From 2001 to 2018 he was Director of the National Inventory Research Project, which created an online database of over 10,000 newly researched records of old master paintings, principally from the UK's regional museums (https://cdm21066.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/NIRP). He has long been interested in the processes of fine art research and cataloguing and in the potential for public engagement in these processes. Over the years, he has worked with Art UK on several projects to further these aims.

Marion Richards

Dr Marion Richards is Art Detective Manager at Art UK. Marion has catalogued more than 300 European paintings at Manchester Art Gallery for the National Inventory Research Project (https://cdm21066.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/NIRP) and volunteered cataloguing marine prints and drawings from the Caird Library collection at the National Maritime Museum. She specialises in nineteenth-century French landscape painting, but her interests include Dutch Golden Age marine painting and twentieth-century British portraits. She is a member of the British Art Network and Understanding British Portraits, which are Subject Specialist Networks, like Art Detective.