The RCM’s art collection: now available online

Tuesday 18 December 2012

Thanks to Your Paintings, a project undertaken in partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC, the paintings at the RCM can now be viewed online for the first time.

This internationally important collection of over 120 works in oils, acrylic or tempera consists mainly of portraits of musicians, dating from the sixteenth century to the present day. Some are on public display in the RCM Museum, but many are relatively unfamiliar, even to scholars. All give insights into the sitters, and how their contemporaries viewed them and their music. They include:

• Iconic images of enormous historical interest, such as the portrait of Joseph Haydn painted by Thomas Hardy in 1791, and the portrait of Ralph Vaughan Williams commissioned by the RCM Council and painted by Gerald Festus Kelly in 1952-3
• Tantalising sketches for paintings later destroyed (a 1905 portrait of Elgar by Talbot Hughes) or never finished (an 1890 portrait of Paderewski by Edward Burne-Jones)
• Striking portraits of less familiar musicians, such as that of the glee composer John Wall Callcott by his brother (and disciple of J. M.W. Turner) Augustus Wall Callcott.

Your Paintings is a partnership project between the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) to put the UK’s entire collection of oil paintings in public collections online. The richness of the RCM art collection (of which the oil paintings are only a small part) reflects the great generosity of donors from its beginnings in the 1880s to the present day.

Professor Paul Banks, Head of RCM Special Collections commented: “The inclusion of the RCM collection in this wonderful and unique national project is an exciting landmark in our efforts to make the rich collections of the College more accessible to scholars, students and the general public.”

All of the RCM's paintings can be viewed on the Your Paintings website.