I am sometimes asked – 'what is the most innovative thing Art UK has ever done?' If pushed to come up with one initiative, I would say Art Detective: our digital network of crowdsourced expert knowledge that has been supporting collections to find out more about their artworks for the last ten years.
Dame Margaret Lloyd George (1866–1941)
1916
Gwenny Griffiths (1867–1954) 
It is therefore with great sadness that we are being obliged to pause its operation on the retirement of the incomparable Dr Marion Richards, who has been running it for the last six years. Put starkly, lack of funding prevents us from replacing Marion. It is also time for a refresh of the interface and that too needs funding.
It is particularly poignant for Art UK that we are having to do this in a year in which we were looking to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Art Detective. Created following extensive consultation with museums (including a conference at The National Gallery), its design was guided by a wonderful Steering Panel comprising collections large and small.
All of us on the Steering Panel recognised that there had been a significant decline in specialist fine art knowledge across collections over the previous ten years, with many museums having lost their curators due to public sector austerity. Given two thirds of the institutions on Art UK are not museums, a large proportion of the collections had never had a specialist curator in the first place.
However, we also recognised that specialist knowledge was in abundance amongst the general public, in universities, among art dealers and retired professionals, and not only in this country but overseas too.
So the question was how to connect demand with supply so that collections could put a name to that unidentified mayor, or that Welsh unnamed landscape, or even the artist of that painting that had simply been referred to as 'British School' for the last 100 years.
Thus Art Detective was born, digitally linking collections with questions to volunteers with knowledge.
Acknowledgement of Art Detective's importance and the innovation behind it was quick to come. In 2015 the Museums and the Web conference in Chicago awarded Art Detective the coveted Best of the Web prize, the first time a British institution had ever won.
An Art Detective discussion in 2019 yielded a truly remarkable find – a portrait by Van Dyck in Liverpool, which was reported in The Guardian and elsewhere.
The Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566–1633)
c.1630
Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) 
Never did we imagine in 2014 that Art Detective would be so successful in attracting so many enthusiastic and dedicated Art Detectives who would devote so much of their time to help collections solve the mysteries behind their artworks.
All of us at Art UK are hugely grateful to them and to the Group Leaders – with specialisms such as maritime art, portraiture and Scottish art – who ensured that the online discussions between Art Detectives were genial, supported by evidence and led to conclusions that could be shared with collections (who had the final word on whether they were accepted).
We will soon be publishing a report that shows the impact of Art Detective. The data and discoveries make for compelling reading. In total there were some 22,000 submissions to Art Detective over the ten years and around 10,000 data enhancements have been made to collection records, including new artist attributions, sitter identities, location identities and dates of execution.
In total 1,200 different museums and collections have benefited from its operation. Every artwork in this story has been enhanced by Art Detective.
As Alice Rylance-Watson, Assistant National Curator, Pictures and Sculpture at the National Trust, has said, 'Art Detective has been an invaluable forum and... greatly improved the accuracy and quality of National Trust cataloguing. The scale of discussions and submissions is remarkable, and testament to the success of Art UK.'
Colonel Oscar Vaughan Viney (1886–1976), TD of Hazell, Watson and Viney Ltd
exhibited 1958
William D. Dring (1904–1990) 
The other extraordinary aspect of Art Detective is how cost-effective it has been. Yes, there were set-up costs ten years ago, but since then, for the vast majority of its life, we have only had one member of staff working on it.
This modest running cost has been steeply leveraged by the enormous in-kind contribution made by thousands of volunteers from across the world. This makes Art Detective a model for how a digital platform shared by thousands of institutions connected digitally to crowdsourced expert knowledge can support museums to efficiently improve their collection documentation at a time of massive financial pressures on the sector.
Sadly, Art UK also faces its own financial and fundraising challenges. This means that for now we have had to put Art Detective on hold whilst we not only seek funds to rebuild the platform – but also to pay for its operation. Hopefully, the wait will not be long. In the meantime, my heartfelt thanks to Marion Richards and to all the amazing volunteers who have contributed so generously to Art Detective's success.
Andrew Ellis, Chief Executive, Art UK
Every artwork in this story has been enhanced by Art Detective in some way. This includes artist attributions, sitter identities and execution dates.
Art UK is a charity. If you would like to help us with our work then please consider making a regular donation.
