Yesterday #ArtMap hit the road and went to Edinburgh where the Scottish National Portrait Gallery hosted us for a live crowdsourcing event. We had a packed house in the beautiful Farmer Education Suite.
After a whirlwind of introductions from all the participants – including our brilliant 30 strong team of local history enthusiasts, authors, curators and students – we had a brilliant introduction to the Imperial War Museums’ vast First World War art collection by Dr Alice Strickland. She highlighted some of the fantastic images that we had bought with us and some that the SNPG had kindly digitised especially for the event.
We split into groups of three and got cracking at solving some of the mysteries, each team armed with a computer, A3 print outs of the artworks, pens, pencils, post-it notes and of course our enthusiasm.
Flotta and Weddel Sound by John Lavery
Within seconds one team had produced a specific location for John Lavery’s peaceful, but isolated work Flotta and Weddel Sound identifying it as just off Scapa Flow. They also managed to isolate the events depicted as taking place just after the HMS Vanguard went down around the time of the Battle of Jutland.
The National Gallery of Scotland also had some fantastic results from the collections of First World War images they had digitised especially for this event. This photograph of Red Cross Hospital staff had no information on it at all apart from a tantalising scribble on the back of it. After some brilliant digging one team managed to work out that this was a factory that was requisitioned as a hospital during the war and located it to the former headquarters of NBL in Springburn, Glasgow.
We’ll be adding all the information, data, comments and questions collected to the artworks on Putting Art on the Map where you can continue the conversation and help add more details to these brilliant artworks. It was an amazing event and we can’t wait to find out more in our upcoming events.
If you’re interested in postal history in the First World War, come along to our event at the British Postal Museum and Archive on the 10th February. For the plane enthusiasts, join us at Imperial War Museum Duxford on the 22 February we’ll be digging into works on aviation.
In the meantime, don’t forget to explore Putting Art on the Map where you can solve mysteries and curate your own tours and collections with IWM’s amazing artworks and follow the conversation through IWM’s daily Tweets, Facebook and Google+ posts.
For the latest news and events, keep an eye on our blog.