Celebrate the best of Scottish art – in your own home
A new online shop is giving you the chance to own your favourite artworks, while supporting local galleries and museums.
The Art UK Shop showcases thousands of artworks available to buy as framed and unframed prints, and this growing collection covers ten independent Scottish institutions. These include the McLean Museum and Art Gallery in Greenock, which houses works by renowned Scottish artists including Allan Ramsay, Sir Henry Raeburn, the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists, and Fife Cultural Trust, which runs Kirkcaldy Galleries, home to a nationally important collection of Scottish art.
“The Art UK Shop provides high quality prints of many of our best-loved paintings, with sales helping to support the ongoing care and development of our collections,” says Matthew Jarron, Curator at the University of Dundee Museum Services.
“Art UK handles the whole process for us – including marketing and customer service – which is enormously helpful, and something we’d never have the capacity to undertake ourselves.”
The University of Dundee is just one institution that has made their paintings available to buy as prints or as a digital image licence through the Art UK Shop.
“Art UK has made the nation’s art collection free to access. But it was always the intention that we would also give collections the opportunity to generate much-needed income through the shop,” says Camilla Stewart, Art UK's Head of Commercial Programmes and Collection Partnerships.
“Many collections wouldn’t be able to do this on their own, but our shared platform allows them to make the most of these artworks for art lovers around the world.
“After the supplier deducts production and delivery costs, all the money from the Art UK Shop goes to the collection."
Art UK is a cultural education charity on a mission to make the art in UK public collections accessible to global audiences. Their website is a collaboration between more than 3,250 British institutions, showcasing over 220,000 artworks by some 40,000 artists. Currently, 448 Scottish collections are represented, from the Highlands to the Borders and the Islands to the cities.
Eighty percent of the artworks on the site are not on public view, allowing you to see pieces you would not normally be able to visit.
As well as digitising artworks, Art UK tells the stories behind the art and plays a major role in supporting public art collections to improve their accessibility and sustainability. After digitising 200,000 oil paintings, works on paper – watercolours, prints and drawings – are being added to the website all the time. Art UK is now adding thousands of sculptures from collections and our streets across the UK.
So, if you love Scottish art and want to own a classic piece for your home, look no further than the Art UK Shop.