We Have Lift Off...

So it turns out that creating a new website for over 2,000 stock items and a potential archive of over 25,000 sold works, is a rather involved process. First off, we want to say that we have missed immensely the regular cataloguing and listing of new artworks in recent weeks, and the communication with customers new and old that comes with it. With the launch of our new—and improved, we very much hope—website this week, we are so glad that normal service can now be resumed!

Our old website was really straining under the weight of all our content, so the switch should make for a much more robust site. And we took the opportunity to rethink our site navigation so that all our interesting themes and subject areas come to the surface. We have implemented a mega-menu where you can browse specialist subject areas, and we have catalogued our S&W curated collections accordingly. So you can easily view, for example, all church pictures specifically, or all architectural collections more generally.

With a new cataloguing system at the forefront, bibliographic and literary analogies have abounded along the way, from the at times Kafkaesque task of navigating multi-million-field databases, to sorting the multifaceted into the particular, somehow holding simultaneously in our minds Blake's world and grain of sand.

Being a small team and handling the majority of the work in-house has had an impact on our usual productivity. But we truly hope that the most interesting threads weaving through our artworks are now able to shine: the forgotten amateur works of Victorian & Edwardian women in the domestic sphere; the Export pictures collected by 19th-century British travellers to Italy, India & China; and the unique record that works on paper from the 19th-century provide of our built and natural world pre-photography.

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