Examination of Witnesses (Questions 283
- 299)
TUESDAY 9 JANUARY 2007
MR JULIAN
RADCLIFFE, MR
RICHARD ELLIS,
MR ANDREW
ELLIS, AND
DR FRED
HOHLER
Q283 Chairman: Can I welcome for
our final session Julian Radcliffe of the Art Loss Register; Mr
Richard Ellis of Swift-Find Ltd; and Fred Hohler, Chairman, and
Andrew Ellis, Director, of the Public Catalogue Foundation. Perhaps
I might begin by asking the Public Catalogue Foundation, first
of all are you encouraged by the exchange that I had with the
HLF earlier? Do you think that you are reaching an accommodation
which might open the door to funding?
Mr Hohler: Can Andrew answer that
because there was no room in here so I was sitting outside on
my telephone.
Mr Andrew Ellis: All I would say
is that we are very soon going to put in another application.
We have fully taken on board all their advice in the very friendly
discussions that we have had with them.
Q284 Chairman: How is progress with
the catalogues that you have already produced? Is there any prospect
that you might be able to cover the costs through sale of catalogues?
Mr Andrew Ellis: I think that
is unlikely. Typically a catalogue costs, including an allocation
of overheads, about £65,000 to produce and for the catalogue
that has been out the longest, which is Leeds, we have probably
had about £14,000 in revenue. For the current year we probably
would cover about 14% or 15% of our costs through catalogue sales
and we would hope that would certainly rise to 25% or so. The
business model though is mainly based on grants and donations
from supporters.
Q285 Chairman: And you are succeeding
in raising money from donations and supporters?
Mr Hohler: Yes, it is hard work,
but the public on a county by county basis are pretty generous.
The area where we find most difficulty, HLF apart, is local government
and the curiosity is that local government, who really in a sense
are responsible overall for the art in their counties, is very
reluctant to put up even the tiniest amounts of money. Some have
been generous and sometimes we get up to £10,000 or £12,000
but often you are stuck with £2,000 or £3,000. The great
public in the counties, who have a lot of goodwill, say, "Why
are not the people who are being paid to look after these paintings
chipping in something?" and it is not a very easy question
to answer.
Mr Andrew Ellis: An encouraging
trend has been that at least one of the museum hubs, the West
Midlands, has committed to supporting a quarter of the costs of
each of their five catalogues, but that has not really been followed
on by many other museum bodies.[25]
Meanwhile overall in terms of fundraising whereas a year ago we
expected about 20% of our funding to come from the public sector
in general, now it is nearer to 15%.
Q286 Chairman: Could you say a little
bit about your experience as to what extent are you publishing
pictures of works that the owners know are there and they have
just decided they are not appropriate for displaying, or are you
actually uncovering works that have long been forgotten and they
come as a great surprise even to their owners that they possessed
them?
Mr Hohler: The owners simply do
not know what they have got.
Mr Andrew Ellis: If you take the
case of Kent for example, in the whole catalogue about 27% of
paintings in that catalogue were by unknown artists across the
whole county. That is probably not exceptional across the country.
Mr Hohler: That is a question
of attribution but do the owners of the museums know what they
have got in their collections? No. Until we have finished the
work nobody knows what is in the national collection of oil paintings
as a whole. At present we know about 20% or 30% from public display.
Q287 Chairman: Have you found any
masterpieces?
Mr Hohler: It is in the eye of
the beholder, Chairman!
Q288 Chairman: Well indeed, but you
have not discovered a work worth a large amount of money that
has simply been forgotten?
Mr Hohler: We are not interfering
with or trying to reattribute paintings. What we are trying to
do is to get the record set up. Do we look at paintings of Queen
Victoria which are described as 15th century paintings of Oliver
Cromwell? Yes. Do we try to get it changed? Yes. But it is not
our business to correct attributions. We would get into terrible
trouble if we did that. So if we think there is a Van Dyck or
a Titian or whatever it is, that is really up to the curatorial
world to sort that out, but they are never going to be able to
sort it out if there is not a visible record for them to look
at, and at the moment there is not.
Mr Andrew Ellis: Can I just counter
something I said before. I did say for Kent it was about 27%.
I think that is probably on the high side for the rest of the
country but there are certainly many counties that we have done
where a percentage—ten to 15%—are by unknown artists.
Q289 Chairman: In the areas where
you have completed the catalogues and it has now been published,
have the museums concerned seen a benefit from the fact that this
information is now publicly available?
Mr Hohler: Yes.
Mr Andrew Ellis: Absolutely. We
have curators who say, "I do not know how I managed without
this beforehand. A copy of the catalogue is on my desk all of
the time." Recently there was a survey done, of the co-ordinators
working on the project at the moment across about 10 counties
and about 380 or so collections, and amongst those 380 collections
only four collections have a complete, illustrated catalogue of
their paintings on-line or in book form. That is a very, very
small percentage so you can see how this can be extremely useful
to them. It is a fantastic opportunity particularly given the
work we do for them is free in that it prompts them also to get
their records into good nick.
Mr Hohler: There is a very big
collection that we did and we produced a catalogue and somebody
came up to me at the launch and said, "I have bought my copy,"
and I said, "But you were curator of this collection for
nine years, why have you bought it?" She said, "Well,
I know I was but I have never seen most of these paintings."
It is a big national collection and you need to have a proper
list, and there is not the money to do it in these places.
Q290 Chairman: Do you have a copy
with you?
Mr Andrew Ellis: Yes we do actually.
Q291 Chairman: Just to pass to my
colleagues so they can see an example.
Mr Hohler: For a small sum of
money!
Alan Keen: Pass it round quickly!
Q292 Chairman: Is there any overlap?
We took evidence a few weeks ago from the Bridgeman Art Library
who were talking about their work in helping museums to achieve
a digital record. You seem to be in the same sort of area. Do
you work with them or is there overlap?
Mr Andrew Ellis: We work very
closely with them and we have a very friendly relationship with
them, but we do not in any way compete with them. We are not in
any way an art image library. We do not rent out painting reproductions,
we do not hold any rights to those paintings, we do not act as
the agent on behalf of the collections, so we do not in any way
compete with the Bridgeman.
Q293 Chairman: And what determines
where you go?
Mr Hohler: Wherever there is an
oil painting in public ownership or supported by public money.
It is only publicly owned art. That is what is so irritating about
it; we own that stuff.
Q294 Chairman: In some cases it must
be quite difficult to know. If they do not know what they have
got how do you know where to go and look?
Mr Hohler: We agitate. You go
along and talk to them and encourage them.
Q295 Mr Evans: What do you do exactly?
You will turn up to an art gallery and then you ask for access
to this 80% of paintings that they have got in storage? Is this
how it works?
Mr Andrew Ellis: We include all
of their paintings not just the paintings that are in storage.
We will approach them and sell them the benefits of the project,
which are free digital images to them, a record that goes on public
display, and then we will ask them to sign an agreement with us,
and then we will ask them for data and then we will arrange a
mutually convenient time when we can photograph their paintings,
we give them the proofs to check, and then we publish.
Mr Hohler: That is for galleries
but we would go to a county council and photograph all the stuff
in the council buildings. You just go and work with whoever is
responsible for the furniture there, or in crematoria or hospitals,
wherever these paintings are—schools, judges' chambers.
Q296 Chairman: You presumably have
some discrimination and you are not going to publish a picture
of every previous municipal chairman that is hanging on the wall
of every council building?
Mr Hohler: Wrong again. Absolutely
without any discrimination at all; we do everything because you
hear, "We have only got 18 boring pictures of aldermen,"
and there is a de Laszlo, a couple of Burne-Jones and a Millais,
and you have got to take them all.
Mr Radcliffe: Even MPs!
Mr Hohler: Even MPs!
Chairman: There must be a huge amount
of rubbish there as well.
Q297 Mr Evans: On the rubbish side,
if you are looking at the stuff that is in storage that is never
put out to public exhibition (even though, as you quite rightly
say, they are publicly owned) what percentage would you categorise
as really not worth the canvas it is painted on?
Mr Andrew Ellis: We make no value
judgments at all about these paintings.
Q298 Mr Evans: No but you look at
the stuff and say it is rubbish.
Mr Andrew Ellis: It is totally
in the eye of the beholder. We allow the readers to make those
decisions, not us.
Q299 Mr Evans: I am trying to make
a gauge of whether there is a lot of stuff there that quite frankly
should be disposed of because it is not worth storing.
Mr Hohler: Wait a minute, that
is a slightly separate issue. For example, in that catalogue in
front of you would see, I guess, a lot of 18th century landscapes.
Perhaps they are not artistically of huge merit and perhaps they
are not by great artists but, by golly, they can be interesting.
They can tell you and your community a huge amount about what
was there before and what has changed and why it was there and
what their society was doing. Very few paintings are ever painted
without a purpose, you know, really. If you go to the National
Museum in Washington and look at the first 100 entries, they are
what are called American naive primitive paintings and they are
cherished there. Artistically, by Titian standards, they are of
pretty insignificant merit, but are they interesting? Yes, they
are absolutely fascinating so you have got to be very cautious
about taking that artistic merit only route, in my view.
Mr Andrew Ellis: We are very democratic
about this.
25 Footnote by witness : On Reflection, this
failed to do justice to the North East Museums Hub who have been
both enthusiastic and committed supporters of our work in their
region and had promised a significant financial contribution towards
the project in due course in addition to a £2,000 grant already
paid to us. It should be noted that since the CMS Committee meeting
on 9th January, the North East Museums Hub has confirmed a commitment
of £20,000 towards the catalogues of their region to be paid
over two years. As we knew already, their development department
will also be helping us to raise other funds for our work from
other donors in the region. This compares to a commitment from
the West Midlands Museums Hub of £15,000 for each of the
five West Midlands catalogues (£75,000 in total). Back
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