This week the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC completed their ambitious project to put online the United Kingdom’s entire collection of oil paintings in public ownership. This includes the British Library’s own magnificent collection which can be seen on the 'Your Paintings' website

The site as a whole includes 212,000 images of oil paintings which you can view, tag and curate into your own ‘My Paintings’ section. To give a sense of the scale of the collection, the National Gallery in London has around 2,300 oil paintings. So it's nearly one hundred times the size of that.

Other partners include the British Museum, Chelsea College of Art, Cutty Sark and the National Portrait Gallery.

Here are some of my favourites from the British Library collection:

Image: Irrawaddy Steamship by J. C. Burnie

Image: A Contemporary Mappa Mundi by Andrea McLean

Image: A Quiet North by Ian McKenzie Smith

Image: Dutch Folly Fort on the Pearl River near Canton

Image: 'Paradoxymoron' by Patrick Hughes

Image: Untitled by John Furnival