Our lost world in watercolours – the paintings that documented Earth — theguardian.com

Hot in the footsteps of Art UK’s ambitious attempt to document every publicly owned artwork in Britain on a single website, a new online project has launched to repeat the project for the world’s watercolours – in particular those that, accidentally or on purpose, documented that world. Watercolour World is the brainchild of former diplomat Fred Hohler, whose first large-scale digitisation endeavour, the Public Catalogue Foundation, laid the groundwork for Art UK. The idea came to Hohler when he embarked on a tour of Britain’s public collections and realised quite how much there was to do on watercolour alone: Norwich Castle Museum held about 4,500 paintings by a single artist; the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, meanwhile, had somewhere between 200,000-300,000 watercolours in its drawers.

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