Art Detective

Art Detective is a website accompanying the great Art UK project (anonline colection of every painting in a public collection in the UK). The aim is to improve the information about these works by sharing knowledge.

For example, yesterday one of the main editors posted the question "Is ‘A Tiger Hunt’ by a follower of Frans Snyders? When was it painted?"

As this is the kind of subject I often blog about, I had a go and found that at least three elements in the work are copies of or closely based on animals painted by Paul de Vos (the son in law of Frans Snyders).

Discussion isn't finished, and final attribution may still change, but this is a fun way to look at art and to give something back to the website and institutions which share lots of information and images with us. The ArtUK website was also the basis for the Hidden Masterpieces series on BBC last year, where Bendor Grosvenor (of Art History News fame) and his team unearthed paintings by a.o. Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Raphael from the vaults of collections. While a potential Paul de Vos is hardly a discovery of the same level, it still is nice to contribute in this way.

Join the fun!