The brilliant Martin Bailey, excellent correspondent at our favourite journal The Art Newspaper, has written about the extraordinary fact that of the 150,000 or so paintings that are in public hands in UK, 80% of them are not on public show - even though they belong to you, me and the rest of the British citizenry.
The figures have been put together by the Public Catalogue Foundation, a charity that has set itself the charitable if Sisyphean task of documenting every painting belonging to the public in the country - from grand works hanging in major galleries to etchings on the walls of hospital corridors.
To me, it's not so much the fact that so few of these paintings are on show that is really alarming. (When I was a teenager I used to work in the Stoke-on-Trent City Museum and Art Gallery in the holidays, and believe me, you wouldn't want to see the entire contents of their store up on the walls every day of the week.) Much more worrying, as the foundation has pointed out, is the fact that large numbers of works are just moldering away, kept in ridiculously unsuitable conditions. And many, extraordinarily, aren't even recorded or catalogued properly.
This is partly down to the malaise in our regional museums. Underfunded and undervalued, regional museums are about the least fashionable bit of the Department of Culture Media and Sport's purview, and it shows. Some of them sound just a mess -- Ipswich Museum, reports the Art Newspaper, hasn't even insured its holdings, which include a number of Gainsboroughs and Constables. These objects are part of our national patrimony, and should be a matter of pride for all of us -- and not just abandoned to dust and decay.
