 I am fawr. Gwyddo. Felly, mae'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio yma, Mark Houtt. Felly rydw i'n gweithio'r Sefn Arhaf. Felly, mae'n gweithio i chi'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio i chi'n gweithio ar y Cymru. Mae'n gweithio i chi ddod o'r pwysig yma o bobl yma. Mae'n gweithio i chi'n gwneud. Mae'n gweithio i chi'n gweithio i chi ff polwod. Ond oed e'n ystyried, bod i wneud hynny'n gweld efallai bod maen nhw'n rhaid i chi yn ddaf yn y cael gyda'i mwyaf y gwaith o hwnnw yn rhaid i gwellio a gwahorch chi'n ddelweddydd. Rwy'n credu eu cyngorraeth CNA yn y prif o bobl clywedu sy'n sefydliad yn y cynyddiol mae'r rhai yn y rhwng a'r rhwng yn gweithio y gwaith ar y byddwn ni'n ei geithio efallai o'u'r hynny'n cyfrif yn ei gwaith arwain y byddwn ni'n golygu'n rhaid i chi, gyda'i amgylch yn gwazio'r cwmachol i ddim yn gweithio'r gweithio ddim yn gweithio'r cwmachol i dwylo'r parwyr. Sefydlu'n gweithio cwestiynau ymlaen o'r ffordd ar ranges i gwyneddul. Gweithio'n bwysig eich gwaith ar玺fyrdd dd mir i gweithio'n ffan dillon. Fy日, mae'r bobl yn cwmai a'r gweithio ar gwaith yn gwybod diwethaf yma ar Greg i'r cyffredinol. Yma, rwy'n hoffi mor bynnag o'i bod ni wedi gwybeth, o'r ysgol sydd wedi bod yn sgrifetio nifer o'r cyflawn. Felly, mae'r llyfrwr yn cael sydd, rydyn ni'n gofio'r ysgol iawn i chi'n gwreidiau ac yn ffordd i'r pethau. Mae'n rhan ffroent o'r chyfnod i ni a'r sgol o'r cyflawn o'r ysgol iawn wedi'n cyddiolol ar y cyflawn. A dwi'n rhaid i'r ddweud i'r dynnu o bobl yn ymwyaf ar y cyflawn. Rydyn ni'n gweithio ar y cyflawn ysgol iawn. Mae'r hyn i, aelodau sefydlu ar gweithio ar gyfer y flwyddyn, mae'r llefiau Thomas Gertin yn 1775-1802 a'r argyflog online ar gyfer arddangos i'r artist yw Dr Greg Sniff. Yn ymgyrch fod ydych chi'n gweithio ar gyfer y cyfrifio pelun o'r holl ddechrau, mae'r cyfrifio ar y cerddur yn y pethau iawn yn cael ei maen nhw i'r holl o'r gweithio. Well, not so well, perhaps, because it was only two o'clock in the afternoon. But this evening, having experienced that first flush of relief, and felt our pent-up anxieties recede as it became evident that this type was truly up and running, I'd like us to hold on to that other parallel feeling of celebration. So we have a lot to celebrate tonight. First of all, the publication of this online catalogue means that we now have an extraordinarily learned, rigorous and stimulating entryway to the works of one of Britain's most ambitious and interesting watercolourists, Thomas Gertin. Second, tonight we can also celebrate a website that I think sets new standards for online art historical catalogs and for online art historical scholarship more generally. It is not so much of this catalogue that more than 2,500 images and some million and a half words is so huge. It's more that it offers users, in addition to its deeply considered catalogue introductions and entries, an astonishing range of carefully chosen supplementary resources for the study of Gertin's works, including a vivid introduction to the artist, a vast treasure trove of archival materials, and scores of carefully chosen comparative images, all of which are to deepen our understanding of the artist and his practice. And thirdly, I want to take a moment to celebrate the PMC team who helped Greg put this remarkable publication together. I know Greg will be doing the same, but I too want to note the stellar contributions of, in turn, Emily Lease, who supervised the copy editing of Greg's voluminous manuscript. Maesun Rahani, who has worked for so many months and is sourcing the hundreds of images that populate the site, many of which have required you to be. And finally, Tom Scutt, who headed the PMC side of this project and has spent much of the past year and more nurturing the site's development, building up its apparatus, inputting great swathes of information into that apparatus, and adding the innovative new features that will help make the site not only useful but exciting to use. We owe Tom and Maesun and Emily a huge vote of thanks and thanks too to our digital marketing manager Alice Reed, our copy editor Hazel Bird, and our colleagues at Keep Thinking, all of whom have also played an important part in realising this project. I'd also like to thank David Salkin, who, at a working lunch many years ago, in a now defunct restaurant located just around the corner, first suggested to me that we might think about a capital devoted to Tom Scutt and who, of course, recommended that we ask Greg to do so. As you might imagine, I have lots of such ideas applied to me at lunch, pitched to me at lunch, particularly after my guest had tried to ply me with a glass of wine or two. This is how one hell of rules are caught and definitely deserved to be celebrated. Fourth and finally, I want to celebrate Greg Smith himself. Well before David made that initial suggestion, I knew full well that Greg was a leading scholar and curator of British art. I loved his tape written show devoted to Gertin, and during my years teaching at York, it set his important book, The Emergence of the Professional Loot Colors, on many student reading lists. But it was only when he went to work on this project that I came to fully appreciate the depth of Greg's knowledge about Gertin, board colours and George Mott. Only then that I came to recognise the sophistication and the reach was thinking about the scholarly possibilities of an online pathway. Only then that I came to feel the full force and it was quite forceful. It was determination to do things scrupulously to check every last detail of his text. And only then indeed that I came to appreciate the creativity and the imagination that alongside his formidable scholarship he brought to each phase of the project's gestation. That our Gertin website has turned out to be quite such a remarkable, multifaceted and generous publication is fundamentally down to you, Greg. All of us and all future generations of the interest in Gertin board colours and in British art more generally are and will be in your debt. Thank you. So can I ask you all then to give Greg a special celebratory welcome as we invite him to come and tell us more about the challenges he faced and the challenges he set himself in taking on and pursuing this monumental project. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark. It's very, very moving. Thank you. Almost exactly five years ago I stood at this podium to launch an online site. Sorry. I've got something. Oh, no, it's gone. It said the power is off. Five minutes to wait. I don't know. It's now gone obviously. Let's start again. Almost exactly five years ago I stood at this podium to launch an online catalogue of the work of the watercolourist, Thomas Gertin, with a two-year contract to complete the task. Looking through the script I delivered then, it seems at one point I stated that I expected it to go online in the spring of 2020. And not surprisingly, it was gently pointed out at the time that that might be a little bit optimistic. Nonetheless, I was confident that I could put the project to bed reasonably quickly and move on to something dare I say more interesting. Inevitably things began to slip as far as my writing schedule was concerned, though in the end I did manage to deliver the bulk of my text just three months late with the intention of delivering any introductory texts when I'd finished the last of my projected visits. All of which, unfortunately, coincided with the first of the COVID lockdowns. Whilst that was clearly an issue, I cannot use that as an excuse, but it actually allowed me to revise my texts in peace and quiet and make significant strides in expanding the archive section of my project. The simple fact is that as a newcomer to the online world, I have grossly underestimated the work required to translate my database, texts and lists of images into a fully functioning multi-linked site. The scale of the undertaking was in itself an issue, 1,550 catalogue entries, covering the complete output of a short but nonetheless prolific career. But the real problems stem from an ambitious, if not reckless attempt to rethink and expand the traditional artist catalogue to take full advantage of the possibilities of the online digital age. More specifically, it was my determination to transcend the catalogue format to encompass three distinct elements targeted at different audiences. An introduction to the artist for those with just a general interest in the arts, a catalogue of the works broadly patented on the standard catalogue raisnay but with added enhancement for historians in numerous fields and working at different levels. Finally, an archive which might be of ongoing use to the specialist in watercolour studies. In retrospect, five years does not seem to have been such a long time for such an ambition and to realise the bulk of those ambitions that I outlined in 2017 that we were able to achieve so much in that time is, and I'm really re-echoing Mark's points here, testament to the amazing support that I have received from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and from all of the staff working here. The project has drawn upon the full range of the centre's resources and I am profoundly grateful for the help I have received. I know that an online catalogue is more akin to an exhibition in the sense that it's a very much a team effort but I would nevertheless like to single out three people in particular for their extraordinary efforts on behalf of the project. First, oh sorry, that's what you should have had at the beginning. First, to Masun Rahani who has done such an amazing job in tracking down and commissioning the enormous number of images we've used on the site, something around 2,500 in all. I've still got this power as off to one minute. Sorry, I'm just getting some funny images on the screen. Then to Hazel Bird who had the unenviable job of editing the text to the high standards associated with Yale University Press. And finally to Tom Scutt who's worked tirelessly on the technical side of the project, dealing with my sometimes unrealistic expectation of what we might achieve with the site and steering through the new elements that I believe will make it hopefully quite fun to use. I want to begin my presentation this evening by looking at the third element of the project as identified in my lengthy title. For though it has involved relatively little work, my aim to make the site as an introduction to the artist for a non-specialist audience has had a profound influence on the overall structure. Typing Thomas Gertin into Google and you are directed to a discouraging and incomplete account on Wikipedia which repeats a number of discredited facts about the artist. Given that the Dictionary of National Biography and other standard reference books such as the Oxford Dictionary of Art are not available freely online and the curious member of the non-academic community may have little alternative but to resort to Wikipedia. Thomas explained that my ambition to see the Thomas Gertin site come up first in the Google search of the artist's name may not have happened yet but I think we've got a credible alternative in place and I have five hopes. The more significant point for me however is that the extraordinary generosity of the Paul Mellon Centre in financing a Gertin site and making it free to access brings with it a responsibility to address a larger and more diffuse audience than would have been the case for a printed and inevitably expensive version of my catalogue. It is for the general user therefore rather than a specialist that I have addressed the short life story, the first section of the site. Short that is by my standards, hopefully jargon free and devoid of speculation that cannot be verified by documentary evidence. It's freely illustrated with some of Gertin's most attractive watercolours and works which are in a good condition and above all unfaded. My hope is that this might capture the attention enough to encourage the non-specialists to move to the next level of introductions. The short texts which are at the head of each of the six sections I've divided the site into. These are even shorter and though they can be read continuously as a brief account of the artist's professional career, they are also aimed at the more general user and lead to catalogue entries via small scale images and the possibility of traversing the artist's career via a broadly chronologically chronological but thematically based structure. I'm not just necessarily thinking here about users who access the site with the intention of finding out more about Thomas Gertin. My own experience of using the Francis Town and Richard Wilson catalogs again produced by the Mellon Centre is that I get there because I'm looking for images of, say, Tivoli and my initial point of contact has little to do with the artist and if that is the case with the specialist I suspect that it's likely to be even more so for the general user. On my visits to local and national archives I've been struck by the fact that not only have I never met a fellow art historian there but when I do so I am surrounded instead by a small army of amateur historians researching their links with the past, whether it be their family, locality or hobby interest. If a free online catalogue, say, of a portrait painter might be expected to attract members of the public researching their own family history then I fancy that something similar will happen with a landscape painter like Gertin and that their point of entry will be through a search by location. Quite a significant amount of my research on Gertin and the topographical contents of his watercolours has depended on the efforts of local historians and keepers of village websites and it is to this category of user that I feel a particular responsibility. Indeed, it goes, I'm sorry, wrong one, indeed it goes further than that because as I remember vividly the fact that a significant percentage of hits on sites such as Francis a town occur at the local level led to a profound shift in my thinking about how my site should work. Reviewing my own use of a town site I realised that knowing the artist pretty well I had little need of the excellence and then the introductions but what are the less well informed who might have landed on the site not from the home page and searching for the artist in a knowing way. The point is that an introduction precedes something it is something that is written to make comprehension of a smaller unit possible and its temporal character is undermined by the site's actual pattern of use in my experience. I'm sure that there may have been some clever ways around the problem but my conclusion was that if I was to make the experience non-specialist meaningful I had to try and make the individual catalogue entry as self-contained as possible albeit with many links to potentially expand the experience. The outcome of this is felt most significantly in the first section of the catalogue covering the early topographical watercolours based on the works of other artists, amateur and professional and the mass of collaborations produced by Gertin at the home of Dr Thomas Monroe. The decision to repeat the same three paragraph formula for each work in the latter category one summarising the evidence that Turner and Gertin's works at Monroe's home the second examining the subject and its source of their copies and the third looking at the question of the attribution led to a frightening increase in my word count but hopefully it addresses the probability that in this area of the catalogue in particular the entry point is very unlikely to be at the artist's level and if anyone is tempted to systematically work through the group they will quickly learn to recognise the elements that change from work to work although the second element of my eccentric tripartite structure the five sections comprising the archive was conceived around a different set of users one element at least was developed with a more general audience in mind I am by nature it seems unusual in being completely uninterested in matters of biography I remember being struck during the 2002 tape by Centenary exhibition of Gertin's work by the number of people who came up to me asking about the artist's character posing questions such as was Gertin the revolutionary or how friendly was his rival with Turner after all all issues I had given little or no thought to part of my thinking with the document section of the archive was to transcribe all of the early anecdote-laden accounts of the artist and link them to my dry factual description of Gertin's professional life and allow users to explore alternative versions to literally let them create their own life of Gertin sadly my plans for the document section proved not to be practical this is simply not possible the technology does not exist as Tom succinctly put it I will return to what that meant but suffice it to say that this was symptomatic of the complex issues I had with the archive in general and that it was here that my ambitions to rethink the catalogue came up against cold reality having said that those earlier accounts of Gertin's life are still there was just a little bit more difficult to locate the archive had started off very well originating in a simple practical problem for which they seemed a straightforward solution about 25 years ago I stumbled across in the Christie's archive a series of unpublished sales from the collection of Dr Thomas Monroe that worked by Turner and Gertin dating from as early as 1797 since then I've added records of numerous undocumented sales of Gertin's works from as early as 1791 when the artist was still a 16 year old apprentice to Edward days the problem with early auction catalogs is that without any illustrations and only the scantiest of details it is very difficult to relate the entries to extant drawings but that does not mean that it might not be possible to do so in the future and so my first thought was to create a record of all of the sales of Gertin's works to build a documentary role of future used to historians and to this end I added transcripts in the very full records of dealers Thomas Poussard and Sons and Thomas Agnews and Sons up to 1922 and at the same time I've also been very exercised by the fact that with the notable exception of the library here at the Mellon Centre auction catalogs have rarely been accorded a full bibliographic status and so to my vastly expanded sales section I added the full reference details of many hundreds of sales featuring Gertin's works together with those of the Monroe School bringing the coverage right up to the present day with the more recent catalogs I needed only to record the most basic details of title and lock number as they are or will be linked to the proven on section of the catalogue it was also particularly important to bring everything up to dates that I might also include record of the works that have appeared on the art market but which I do not consider worthy of close attention in my catalogue if at all the key elements for me in all of this is the link from the provenance field which allows users to consult full reference and investigate the context of the sale if they wish and this was to be an integral part of the wider strategy whereby I hope to use the archive in its links as a means for interested users to check the veracity of my own use of documentary material all at the same time as creating a mega sized document of almost 100,000 plus words which might be used for wider research purposes for those working in the field of watercolours I'm not that sure where I got the idea from or why I thought it might work again as Tom rightly pointed out it is simply not practical to create such a large linkable field that fulfills so many distinct functions the good news is that all of the data is still there on the site and I have completed transferring the Agnews and Pulsar records to the document section where they can be searched by date and I am a third of the way through moving the auction records to the exhibition section of the archive where they will again be listed by date auctions with identifiable works will then be linked back to the provenance field whilst details of the earliest sales and their contents can still be accessed chronologically the rescue operation might turn for reconfiguring much of the data in the archive so that it can meet the access in a way akin to my earliest aspirations I'm afraid taken up quite a lot of my time recently the way that the short form reference to auctions in the provenance field of the catalogue will be linked to the exhibition section it's just one part of a reference system that links across the site some sites use the extra word capacity of the online world to incorporate full bibliographic or exhibition details up front but I personally find that distracting and I suspect it is off-putting for the non-academic user as well so wherever possible I have used links from a short form reference to bibliography and exhibition sections of the archive presuming that those who are interested will follow that path and in general I have tried to hide away as much material as I can sadly the reference system is still a work in progress with a significant number of the links still not functioning I may have had used a style sheet to maintain consistency but some of the data was actually entered into my database up to 25 years ago and inevitably there are many issues still to be sorted out and there is also one area that archives which is not possible to link to the documents section which as I've noted had to take a different form from what I originally envisaged the section containing a rattlebag of contents includes as a prominent feature my transcription of every manuscript and published document that I used in creating the site together with many I just consulted the title a wordy record of dated watercolours and prints early accounts of the artist and his works manuscripts relating to sales and collections even manages to miss out much else including family records and exhibition reviews and much other material my intention was to link from the about this work part of the individual catalogue entry to carefully selected passages from this mega document that is from say a short discussion on Gertin's choice of pigments to a highlighted selection of Edward Daisy's instructions of drawing and colouring landscapes which would give background to my contention the artist had a good grounding in colour theory or to take another example to link from a text about an online outline drawing made for the picturesque views in Paris to highlight it extract from Thomas Holcroff's eye witness account of Gertin's work in the environs of the city in 1802 however again at around 150,000 words and the mass of petrogeneus material this was never going to work as a single document with multi-links and it has had to be reconfigured as a year by year record it is ironic that this was all part of a general plan to outlaw the use of the footnote as unsuited to an online site and that in the end I had no option other than to replace my links with footnotes which explained how to get to the part of the document section that I had linked in my imagination and which works so well as screenshots the consolation for me is that all the documentary material from which the sale was fashioned can still be accessed and that though this might require a little bit of extra work on behalf of the user it might reward their curiosity and give some idea of how envisage an online catalogue might result in and encourage a more flexible and creative relationship between reader and text although not part of my original thinking the archive section has come to have an added meaning especially as it has been the main area of development during the second part of the site's genesis for not only is it the repository for the material from which the site was created but it forms a basis from which it can continue to evolve hopefully beyond my own direct involvement that is the big challenge that comes with the ambiguous advantage of an online catalogue namely that it's unique potential to grow and change in the future cannot be guaranteed the printed catalogue is destined to survive albeit as a frozen snapshot of the state of knowledge at a given time but the online version can incorporate institutional apathy as I've found out in the past to my sadness or to the simple fact that there is no one with the knowledge or interest to maintain it and keep it up to date the archive I confess is where I have laboriously placed the contents of my filing cabinets in the belief that this is the best chance I have of ensuring that the site has a viable and dynamic future the great thing about a short lived artist with a unique name is that after two decades of internet searches we are probably not too far off being able to say that the archive is nearing if not completion then something close and that is the real point behind recording of those wretched sales and the fruits of the endless searches of printed material it will both save anybody else from the task and provide the material for future insights without hopefully an enormous amount of extra work ostensibly the third and largest part of the site a catalogue of around 1550 entries is as close to the standard catalogue format as I could make it with the usual data fields followed by discursive text I'm not sure that I entirely see the point of an extensive provenance field but it seemed to be part of the job of a catalogue as a record of everything related to a work and its history and in the end I put a lot of effort into improving the standards of cataloging watercolours and by linking the field to full records of each sale do something a little more the labors of many of the family historians I encountered in the archives are there in there somewhere as well the one thing I was able to drop from the standard catalogue format was the description of the subject that still rather bizarrely features in many online sites but left over when images were necessarily used spheringly if I have accepted the standard format of the printed catalogue as my starting point it was in the knowledge that we always plan to introduce three new elements that can significantly enhance the visual experience of the catalogue for the non-specialist and can contribute also to its research aims the first stem from a rare criticism of the Francis Town website namely that it was impossible to make simple comparisons between images of different works whether it be a pencil sketch and a finished watercolour a drawing on the print made after it or different versions of the same subjects my inspiration in this respect the William Blake archive makes these staple ingredients of art history such fun to use the solution that the web designers came up with for us makes it possible to view up to four works together as here with versions of the two different views of the Bridget Hores in Yorkshire the second enhancement was motivated by my interest in the way that tracing copying and the making of replicas were a fundamental part of Dirtian's practice not just early on in his career at the home of Thomas Monroe the site includes more than 50 overlays that is the superimposition of two or even three images which can then be drawn back to reveal the work underneath in this case the act of revealing the image beneath has proved useful in establishing the role of tracing in Monroe's school works such as the three versions of Dover Harbour here superimposed but it has also been useful or helpful with questions of attribution as in the case of two drawings of St Martin's Church Dover which have been attributed to both Gertin and Turner in the past the final enhancement the addition of the relevant portion of Google Maps to the works with a recognisable topographical subject is I suspect likely to attract more feedback than any other feature of the site but I expect that my hand-fisted efforts to pinpoint Gertin's viewpoints will not be met with universal agreement and that this feature will help to engage with the non-academic origins more than any other in the example I show here of a possible site for the Monroe's school watercolour of Grindelwald I was sorry to see what I originally thought where the main ski runs black and red and blue turned out to be ski lifts but still very useful I hope these ways of extending the catalogue experience no more than aspirations when I delivered my paper of the outset of the project have gone some way to dispelling the anxiety I expressed at the time that Thomas Gertin, an outline catalogue might be confused with dismissed as a catalogue raiser name my concerns centred on the complicity of the traditional catalogue with the art market and its need for certainty around the issue of authenticity and with the concomitant role of the author as an authority and guarantor of that authenticity my solution then if it can be called that was to define my role as more akin to that of an editor than an author and to suggest that an open access online site might with time create a more collegiate and collaborative model of authority I forget at what time, at what stage I chose to employ the question mark in the creators field but I certainly did not signal it in my lecture five years ago which is very odd because it is the simplest way to signal an independence from the art market and all of those terms school of, follower of, circle of that need an extensive glossary to understand the question mark for me means everything and nothing everything covering the full range of uncertainty from a minor doubt provoked by the opinion of another writer or critic to a level of skepticism justice side of shading into unknown artist or another named artist with a question mark in front of their name now the question mark is no more than a simple direction to the user to refer to the full discussion of the attribution attribution in the about this work text where the issue can be dealt with in detail and the terms of my uncertainty can be spelled out not surprisingly given that a Monroe school drawing can contain up to three authors and three question marks there have been issues with moving from my working base working database to the system used for the site and I suspect that quite a few of those question marks were lost in the process and will need returning the second crucial decision I made in an effort to distance myself from a certain type of catalogue came later when I began to write the first batch of catalogue entries in November 2018 every aspect of the catalogue, not least the about this work text have been written in chronological order which meant that from the start I came face to face with a full range of attributional issues distinguishing Gertin's works from those of his master Edward Day's or fellow young artist Turner with a complex range of issues relating to the collaborative copies made by the two artists that Thomas Monroe's home my solution to what threatened to become a major psychological block to writing was to revert to the first person I whenever there was a contentious matter of judgement and it came as a profound relief to be able to signal and admit my uncertainties and frequently changing thoughts in this direct way one of the readers a part of the manuscript for the site took me to the tusk for the overuse of the first person pointing out that that would make the job a successor to update the site to very complex that's certainly true but the catalogue it seems to me is a strange hybrid mix of dry record and subjective opinion and I'm keen to signal where one shades into the other moreover given that it requires a personal investment bordering on the obsessional to approach the ideal of completion at the heart of the catalogue project the impersonal language of the author authority figure seems particularly inappropriate to me the issue of authority is a particularly complex one because although I've really acquired a wealth of knowledge about Curtin's work over the years I would be the first to admit that a close stylistic analysis as the basis of a sound attribution the cornerstone of the traditional catalogue raisin is not exactly my strong point and in that sense I'm not sure how much reasoning there is here certainly not enough to cause anything other than the plain Anglo-Saxon catalogue perhaps this is a convenient excuse for my failings as a connoisseur but I still believe in what I said at the inception of the project namely that the health of a catalogue can be measured by the frank disclosure of its uncertainties this is true of the other staple ingredient of the catalogue the emphasis placed on dating in Curtin's case the only significant number of works that he at the only time he the only significant number of works that he dated occurred between 1800 and 1801 leaving my predecessors Thomas Curtin and David Losh act to organise their catalogue into six phases based on the stylistic development and the belief that they could date of work to any given year this seems wildly optimistic to me and the whole concept of periodisation and the career lasting less than a decade is a strange one my attitude is again rather more relaxed and I take the line that if you work out the function of the drawing the date tends to look after itself arguably within a year or so either way my favourite example of this principle in action is this simple outline of St Bright's Church in London hitherto dated confidently as a juvenile work to 1792 but which turns out to be a utilitarian study produced for the London panorama in 1801 consequently I have placed much greater effort in this area into organising the sequence of images within the thematic sections into a broadly chronological order and that it seems to me exemplifies the crucial difference between my online catalogue with its much more extensive visual resources and that of my predecessors it's the position of the work visually in relation to others that is the key and that too underpins my final rationalisation for what might be characterised as failings in my approach to the catalogue so much of the traditional apparatus of the catalogue is about the verbalisation of what is lacking in terms of imagery do we need, I wonder, an exhaustive analysis of the forms of the foliage in the youthful landscape by Gerson and how it relates to work by his master Edward Daze when there is a good colour image and a comparative illustration to do much of the work for you. At this point when I came to make the first draft of this talk I managed to depress myself thoroughly after tabling some notes under the heading failure to advance my research agenda which is fairly typical of me. I looked back at my lecture five years ago and saw the illustrations of a string of interesting discoveries that I had made prior to the beginning of the project as well as reading my confidence assertion about what more there might still be to discover. At the outset of the project I was envisaging long introductions and shorter texts for each entry and it therefore came as a shock when having had to change my strategy I terminated the research phase prematurely and severely limited my visits to see works, new works by Gertin and since then restrictions on access to works of art into libraries compounded my case by my role as a carer have meant that after completing the writing phase I had virtually no personal contact with Gertin's works for almost two years. Indeed I was only briefly able to resume travelling this spring all of those visits to see interesting drawings impressive, ones he's stocked in on teas, Huddersfield Nottingham and Kendall have yet still to happen and I never rescheduled the plan return trip to Yale though my old notes fortunately seem to have stood the test of time in that respect I'm acutely aware that this has been to the detriment of some of the research aims that I identified in 2017 specifically to examine more closely the relationship between Turner and Gertin's early works and to attempt to unravel some of the attributional problems associated with those two artists more than that though the events of the last few years has led to a disorientating disengagement between myself and the subject of the site the work of Thomas Gertin this is not to say that the site has suffered necessarily as I say I've had plenty of time to fashion the archive section into a state that I thought would take years of retirement and endeavour but I think it has undermined a sense of confidence in my judgement in judgement that effortfully comes from a close and frequent engagement with works and which was arguably stronger for me four years ago than it is now it's been a very strange experience knowing that I have become increasingly dependent on the site I am creating for contact with the work of its subject it was of course highly optimistic of me to think that producing a catalogue would inevitably lead to exciting new research as opposed to being the outcome of those discoveries that motivated me in the first place and with that thought the realist in me can now readily look back and in concluding my talk this evening return on a more optimistic note to some of the new discoveries that gave me such satisfaction and pleasure when the often tedious labours of checking and correcting data input has threatened to weigh me down at the outset of the project I had a list of works that clearly bore eronias titles but for which no suitable alternative came to mind they did not constitute the most significant examples of Gertin's work but there were a good test my confidence assertion that in an area that in an era of mass digitisation and difficult images we really should be able to solve quandaries such as the obviously mistitled ruins of St Augustine's Priory canterbury from the Courtauld Gallery which I could not readily identify when working on an exhibition of the Spooner collection in 2005 this thanks to a correspondent who contacted me through the Mellon Centre Jason McInstree turns out to be an image of the little known ruins that have been in Buckinghamshire almost certainly after the work of another artist if not this print then probably a sketch by James Moore it's intriguing to note that whilst my lecture five years ago was filled with newly discovered sources for Gertin's work this has slowed down and we may well be reaching the limits for that particular area of research though by their nature the discoveries that bolster the researchers' morale are gloriously unpredictable there is a particular pleasure from correcting the mistakes of your predecessors, cataloging is after all a very competitive activity and I have always had this drawing titled from the misreading of the inscription to the right as Thetford in Norfolk as an easy target for correction as Gertin certainly never visited that county this time with the help of Dr Edward Impey and the Custall Studies Group we were able to identify in Thetford, Custall in Northumberland, post to Morpeth the fact that the drawing had been folded vertically suggests as with the example of a panoramic sketch of Jedbra that the artist might have been trying out how the subject looked as a vertical composition indeed if he had a finished watercolour the subject in mind it is possible that it might even be a waiting rediscovery in a nice coincidence the digitisation of topographical images in the British Library has thrown up this watercolour another closely related Northumberland scene, hither to unidentified allowing me to identify this work as not showing badly cruises in Wales as had been suggested but the obscure subject of the ruins of the Lady Chapel at Bothel again near Morpeth probably got that pronounced wrongly obscure presumably because the humble ruins depicted here were all but swept away within a few years of painting I showed an image of a newly identified view of Wetherby Castle Gateway, sorry Morpeth Castle Gateway from the Mellon Collection in 2017 as well as another Bothel subject depicting the castle all of which makes for an attractive group of unsuspective views all taken within a few kilometres of each other probably around 1800 Wetherby Castle is far from being an obscure subject but Gertin's idiosyncratic viewpoint makes it look for all the world as though it is a lonely isolated tower overlooking an open landscape from a lofty eminence variously titled as Nezbro Castle in Yorkshire and Limpney Castle in Kent the correct subject came to me from I'm not quite sure where but put it down probably to an unhealthy obsessive need to put the project on and here is a change of title I did not suspect Heavensea Castle turns out to be Alton Castle in Staffordshire identifiable from the drawing by James Moore in the Yerl Centre for British Arts on which it is based I can only conclude that successive generations of Gertin scholars have not visited the Alton Towers theme park or the area would have been surely corrected a long time ago I suppose what all this means is as a researcher you make the discoveries you are qualified to make and that they reflect a personal interest or bias and in my case that is not matters relating to attribution but a great and abiding interest in architectural history and it's relation to the imagery of the built environment Indeed in some ways I've already become the consumer of my own science and begun using it in ways I originally envisaged for others Over the years I've been particularly engaged by the ways in which topographical images can be misused One instructive example is a way that Gertin's reconstruction of the ruin castle of Morton Corbett in Shropshire has been mistakenly used as evidence of its appearance at the turn of the 18th century rather than as a visualisation of an unrealised plan for its rebuilding presumably commissioned by its owner With that in mind I wonder if something similar is not at work here in the interpretation of this drawing of Bridge North which Gertin and Losch Act decided was begun in 1798 and completed in 1802 when it was said that part of the gatehouse was demolished This act, it was said, required Gertin to revisit the Shropshire town to record the changes but that always sounded very far fetched to me and I am now reasonably sure that the gatehouse had already been amended by 1798 when Gertin visited and that the local historian quoted by Gertin and Losch Act based his erroneous date for the changes to the gatehouse on Gertin's signed and dated watercolour of 1802 Although I have not yet to verify this with a trip to the Shropshire archives from what I have seen in the documents online it appears to be a case of two sets of historians both essentially amateurs being complicit in unnecessary confusion I may of course be wrong in suggesting this as a good example of the need for good art history to be aligned with the sound use of documentary material but that is the glory of the online site that I can correct myself I don't perhaps have the best connections in the art world and my visits to private collections have necessarily been quite limited but they have resulted in at least two major discoveries the most significant aesthetically being that of a couple of major unpublished watercolours showing Dunsbury castle which I showed the second slide and the best preserved of the pair was seen from a more distant part than the celebrated drawing and the tate It must date from soon after Gertin's visit to the north-east in 1796 and includes an early example of the drawing filled in the cartridge paper that he began to use around this date I guess this is the only work discovered since the 2002 exhibition that I would have loved to have included in that show Less spectacular but no less interesting for an understanding of Gertin's sketching practice is the discovery of a group of seven drawings made in the environs of Nersborough and Weatherby in 1799-1800 which includes three sketches for known watercolours and an intriguing copy replica of a drawing of Weatherby This sketch inscribed Nersborough on the back has allowed us to identify a fine hitherto unknown village scene as a view along the river Nid as well as another version in the British Museum which is possibly a copy but as I speculated in 2017 the more we discover about Gertin's sketching practice the more complex become the issues I'm still confident that the artist himself sold his sketches to interested collectors and that may have been the motivation behind the creation of replicas such as this of Weatherbridge but I'm increasingly concerned about the level of involvement in the process of the artist's brother John Gertin and this has only grown stronger since I completed the writing process for the catalogue John had access to the artist's studio after his brother's death and I suspect that in addition to selling office sketches there have been responsible for adding washes of colour to studies such as this to make them more saleable for the record I think the version on the top is the later i.e. the copy but I did not have but I had to go back to the catalogue itself to check and remind myself of this the splodges in the bottom I think are something to stop the fixative sorry I have just a few more images introduced as a reminder that the site is as I again suggested in 2017 more than about a single artist for its sheer scale and the inclusion of many hundreds of collaborations and an equal number of source images by any number of artists mean that it's effectively incorporates many surveys of the work of Curtin's Brett contemporary Turner his predecessor John Robert Cousins as well as a new material relating to amateurs particularly to James Moore I'm not sure that I've made enormous progress on understanding the activities of Curtin and Turner at the house of Thomas Monroe other than to assemble a complete as complete a record of the visual material as it is possible to imagine but I have at least added to the stock of Italian drawings by John Robert Cousins there are three possibly four hitherto unpublished drawings by Cousins in the collection of the VNA part of the gift of of works by Charles James Richardson and which have been confusingly catalogue as the work of Jay Cousins spelt C O U S I N S and one of them this study of the tomb of the Horatiae and Curatiae dated October 1778 as a claim to be the model for this Monroe school collaboration between Curtin and Turner I've also made some progress in identifying the objects of the Monroe school works this unidentified near-politan view turns out to show a scene on the island of Capri Cousins has not been associated with a visit there and so I'm not sure if that means that we can add that to the catalogue of his travels or if it suggests that we should be looking elsewhere for the source of the Monroe school copy I think I favour the former however this point in the lecture I was to conclude by outlining some of the issues that I did not feel able to cover in the catalogue but which I hope that my Gertin site might provide the basis for further research on and thus feature in a future event at the Mellon centre but to be honest I'm finding it very difficult to switch from the very particular and narrow focus demanded by catalogue format to broader questions and issues for which the site might help inspire I'm pretty clear what the weaknesses of the site are and what I need to make it work better but it is perhaps presumptuously to propose that my unknowable, unknown audiences might now make of it To my delight the 2002 Tate exhibition helped to re-engage David Hockney with the watercolour medium and there is a particular pleasure to be had in discovering the impact of one's work in ways that could not have been envisaged I'm not sure if Matthew Plampin's 2015 novel Will and Tom was in any way written as a response to my silence on biographical matters in the earlier exhibition but more recently I've been so pleased to see my silence to see how my endeavours over the years have helped in some way to inform Oscar Zarate's forthcoming graphic novel, Thomas Gertin, The Forgotten Painter The book charts the effects of Thomas Gertin's work on the lives of three individuals one of whom Fred, seen here conversing the ghosts of Gertin is set out at its conclusion to embark on the all-encompassing task of writing a groundbreaking account of his artist hero I concluded my heartfelt afterword to Oscar's brilliant book by saying that his hero will be very tired by the end of his task as I am exhausted but if my efforts can result in such unexpected and heartwarming results my labors will not have been in vain and if I have produced a resource for others to use in the future I would like in addition to thank you again Paul Mellon Centre and its director of studies Mark Callott I would like in addition to thank them to mention the names of my family to Liz, Dori, Magda and Michael for their practical, emotional and financial aid during the years of this project Thank you The final concluding slide was to be this but I prefer that You are going to sit here and we are going to pick up a microphone so online viewers can see us and hopefully hear us better so are there any questions that the audience would like to hear if the emcee would like to ask a break having heard a really fascinating overview of some of the issues you've been interacting with and the logic behind your arrangement and some of the problems you've faced as you've been putting together Yes, Amy Hello Greg, thank you so much that I was really honest and had a lot of heart and soul in your introduction I can tell that from the site You mentioned a few times the exhibition in 2002 and 20 years of elapsis that point and all of this research in putting together that exhibition and it's curating in its sections display and catalogue but you might do differently now for you to mount the same show I think that by the last but one section with Anurama, I missed out such an important context and this was something that I have re-engaged with over the more recent years and that is that the curtain is essentially a city dweller and the focus on the panorama, the London panorama was fine, it needed to be balanced with the city in general and specifically Paris and that section now seems to be calling out for a London Paris switch between the two and what I felt slightly embarrassed by the Paris Prince I'm not quite sure why but I think that they are in some ways and they are a genuine response to an alien city environment and a real attempt to negotiate his own position within the city environment and I'd like to focus on that much more so take those Paris Prince out of the working section and really go for that as a strong focal point the other thing that I think I'd like to correct was just a piece of really bad art history the early works which I featured in the exhibition I just characterised as well this is how an artist learns from their teacher they copied their works etc but what I didn't realise and only subsequent to the discovery of his sales was that Edward Dayes was sending his beautiful works to the sales room at the same time as his own works in other words they were fully fetched commodities with a commercial value and I was saying well they were all about him adopting the methods of his teacher learning from his teacher he's producing commodities for sale and I doesn't say but that would be other things that I'd like to change Thank you very much You wanted to question you Congratulations Greg that's amazing if this is what an artist who died at 27 means what we do about other people because I've been very involved with Database at the British Museum and I know what huge numbers of responses we get to that how are those responses to this catalogue especially any updates that people suggest or that you suggest yourself how will they be dealt with I'm probably not the best person to answer that if there is a feedback function within the catalogue and I'm expecting to be those on a regular basis when I talk about updating effectively there's probably a new sale maybe a couple of new sales every month so just taking on more of that requires a regular update it'll be very interesting to see how much feedback there is there will be two sorts one will be you've got the location for this but the other will be I have found the oil painting that was supposedly lost in the fire in 1816 there will be lots of things like that missing words will most definitely come up but there is a project to continue David I was struck by a number of things I'll just start with one you talked about how the experience of working on this catalogue particularly in the last few years is kind of alienated from the works themselves are you concerned or would there be a reason to be concerned that basically that's precisely what the site will do that's to say it will become in a sense a replacement for the original works and if it does I'm trying to think of what the implications of that kind of substitution would be I'm not particularly anxious about that personally it's just one of those things that happened in that way I plan to spend so much time visiting and doing and seeing it's just one of those things that happened it was unfortunate I'm a little bit more concerned about the longer term the personal thing is just that I'm fascinated the first is one of the things that I haven't highlighted but it is possible to add a bit of colour and a bit of extra contrast to the images we're getting to the point where we can do a bit of online virtual restoration and the watercolour is returning a bit of colour and that needs really as a concept because in some ways the exact lit screen of an image of a watercolour is and can be more seductive than the actual objects certainly when it's on the walls of a gallery from the life below life conditions and I think we have to accept that as a positive thing so it becomes a better water experience I don't think it's a replacement but the great thing about the watercolour is to be able to to get the light catching the paper understanding the interaction between paper and paper now that you can't get to the same degree online but you do get a different and not necessarily worse it's serious and it's only going to change over the course of time when we have more sophisticated ways of manipulating the image and when watercolours in turn have lost a bit more of their colour I think it will be a replacement there are certainly collections by the British Museum where you can go and look at what some original work-wise suspicion is that that will happen particularly because the quality of the image is so high that that will sense that people will feel they've got the need to get the need to move Do you think that's the case here more than a very well produced book catalogue recently? I think that I think yes I think that it's part of the sort of the seductive character and the fact that we've got so much of our information now we get online and there's something about the screen which makes it more invisible that you see I may be wrong Martin you said there's a question coming in from an online view There are several notes from a full sum thanks and congratulations in the chat a question here from Timothy Wilcox Timothy also says thanks for the fascination talk but asks how does the catalogue deal with copies after Gertyn? Yes, I was very keen not to have separate entries on copies so they genuinely as comparative illustrations with discussion at the end of the most relevant known work there are one or two exceptions to that where the work itself has been confused with the original and where there may still be some controversy for example he's referring to I'm sure will be the second version of the White House of Chelsea with Chelsea which is in the private collection in Norfolk and I have dealt with that as a separate part of the entry because it has been quite a long time with what's considered to be the final version certainly to the 1970s but which is I believe a copy by Samuel William Reigns and I have actually attributed it to Reynolds with a question on it I was very struck when you talked about putting all the contents of your file in cabinets into the site and I mean you know of course that we at the centre often received the quest of artists who are in materials and artists papers and it's interesting to me to think about that section of the website essentially being your the primary sources upon which you drew and which scholars would typically draw to write their books or to write their articles or to their monographs and visual artists and I'm just interested to think about what status that kind of archive has is it that the online project is giving you the chance to as it were not done but dropped all this material that would typically be in a scholars papers but not find expression through the translated commentary and interpretation of the monograph and you just have the opportunity to do something that most people don't have the opportunity to do or do you see it as something that is really fundamental to the workings of the catalogue I'm sure the answer is the second but it would be interesting to think about because it's clear that you've also faced difficulties about reconciling that massive material to your core catalogue I just wonder if it feels like something that's there's massive material that's not quite yet integrated into the core and you have a chance to add it to the site Two things, you saw the first draft of my paper where I said I was going to and I wouldn't be passing on the contents of my filing cabinet as part of the Smith archive to the library which would be very great but I don't see it as a legible writing I see it as the way forward I mean I don't like to put that in I'm proposing this as a model but I imagine in 50 years time every artist will have a dedicated site to their work, incorporating all of the work all of the source material the documentary material obtained as an artist it seems the logical way to go away from standard mon graph book to an accumulation of data it's possible, it's just about possible to do it with Goethe because he only lived at 27 I thank God that he did to all his life and all his work but it is possible to reach a point of confusion and it's probably not so far off that the law of diminishing returns has set in as far as printing published material it's set in a little while ago I think as far as the manuscript material well who knows but that's where the digital system is likely but to be absolutely proud looking as a late 80th century artist she's got a lot more pretty close to reaching the point at which you can think of completion and that's how I see the future game we will one day have a mega term site which will contain everything from which terms that can be derived frightening thought again but why not I mean why are all these details now there's nothing we have to need to gather this material so that everyone can create there's an element of bringing up the user if you provide everything there is available it's beyond your own text beyond your own interpretation it's up to everybody else to make what they will of that material and if that's to challenge your interpretations if that's the additive aspect if it's to go down the line of fantasy biography if I don't enjoy it that's fine but the big project is sort of thinking beyond the book and the catalogue to something much more relevant microphone again David please sorry I'd just like to come back to follow up not on Mark's question but on Tim Wilcox's question and your response to it I mean one of the things that I'm sure you said that must have struck everybody listening to you is that you said basically that you don't when you said that kind of assertion strong which is not something you generally hear from somebody who has produced a catalogue resonant or otherwise and I'm trying to put that together within your response to Wilcox which is about distinguishing Samuel William Reynolds's copy of the White House from the original now I'm trying to I mean I think forgive me for saying this that your assessment of your own weakness is a bit disingenuous at least it sounds like that to me and I'm not quite sure what the motivation is whether it is in some ways because you're worried about complicity with the market but I wonder if you could just unpack that statement a bit more and tell us why you felt obliged to in a sense say that what is generally taking to be the kind of principle of responsibility of the compiler of catalogue is one where you feel that actually you don't, I mean if I understood you correctly that you felt this was an area of weakness in terms of your skills to go to the Samuel William Reynolds copy that would be a case where I would say if you can understand the function of the work and its place within Gertin's production but also his relationship to Samuel William Reynolds then the attribution becomes a matter of more logic than visual analysis he's got all the right credentials for it and that to me is just as important as a close reading of the style when I say I'm not very good I did preface that by saying that I think I probably know more than anybody else which is a sort of authority because I'm not suggesting that there's anybody who knows more but I know for well that's only because I've spent more time on it and I know for well but it's just not something I'm particularly strong at I mean I've been taped to task with a fast forward making mistakes and it's just something I'm not as good at at other things but you know that's the part of the circular argument and in the end I actually don't think it's particularly important that I'm not very good at that because I think the more important things and the more important thing I think to do with attribution and daising the traditional commissarial skills those are important I don't deny that, I've worked in an art gallery where you have to make those sort of commissarial judgments on a daily basis when you're making purchases when you're requesting loans I mean it's absolutely part of your life but the specific circumstances of the curtain and the catalogue actually allow me to play a bit more to my strength and to my weaknesses and it's having a career which is relatively short and it's having so just to pick up on that I'm intrigued by David's propagation or question really about authority because working as a museum curator and writing a lot of texts at the moment for works, the tone of voice that is constantly, this is what we're trying to adopt is something that isn't so authoritative that is maybe leading a viewer to sort of question what they see and compare themselves without us saying this is what this shows so to me that seems like well you sound like you're being very hard on yourself actually but in a way maybe it's up to the viewer to pass on their judgement on the stylistic analysis David I'm interested, do you think this is a bad thing or a good thing or do you not mind so much it sounds like it sounds like you expect more sort of authority from the website on things like stylistic analysis or research in relation to Gertan's work am I right in thinking that you expect that more I don't think I mean I think I don't think the issue of authority can be more I think that it is not up to the author in some ways to make that decision I think that the even before the launch of the website I've seen Greg's name and the website cited in auction categories so I mean the point is that that authority is going to be described to the catalog no matter how no matter the accompanying language if it's there it's got a TG number it it requires that authority and in some ways I think that it's unavoidable I mean you're quite right I mean the questions about the authority of course have now quite a long history going back to blog and so on but we're dealing with a catalog which in a sense is a form no matter how you want to distance yourself from or revise it it is a very old fashioned thing to do it is a discursive form which in a sense predates all of the anxieties of the authority and and I think that I mean I think it's fascinating what you end up with is something which is and I think maybe this is what you're kind of getting at is in a certain extent it's intellectually incoherent because it basically the form creates certain expectations which I mean Greg say he doesn't want to fulfill whether you have whether that's up to you or not I think is a different matter but I have been quoted already as you say in auction catalogs and it's always referred to as a catalog raiser name by Greg Smith and that's why I'm afraid it's also been referred to in the earlier styles referred to a catalog raiser name here in the Mellon Centre but no no no sorry but yes you are it's absolutely it's inevitable but Greg it sounds it's almost as if the category of the catalog at one level is being there's still a demand very much from the trade for instance and it's about the fragmentation and it's whether that fragmentation is about the way in which the online gathering of material and amassing material breaks it it makes it almost impossible for things to be managed because what you're talking about is becoming as you've found it's becoming increasingly unmanagable and massive data here that as an individual or editor or is it whether it's also about an intellectual challenge not the single art is a catalogue and whether the intellectual challenges to that idea of the traditional catalogue are also challenging it so it is an interesting object in a way the thing that you've produced because it is doing one thing with certain inventions at the same time it seems to be an almost from within exploding and I think that's what's exciting about it and I want it to be a focal point for lots of different ways different points of energy and different entries so whilst the auction houses and the dealers etc are one art of that I wouldn't have done it unless there were all the other possibilities and that's a need for me but it is also a possibility of it going in a different way it's a critique of the catalogue as well as a tradition I think what is interesting I quite like it's intellectually coherent in a way but also you're saying that there's lots of different directions and there's lots of different sections that are for different people and this is not a one size fits lots of different kinds of uses and I think in a way that collaborative model of authority to go back to that idea of authority it may not feel coherent yet but I'm excited to see how it goes and exactly how you say Mark just sort of exploding the possibilities of the catalogue because as the title of your talk suggests you know this is an online age we're in a different age now I think it's a positive thing and I will watch with great interest Any other questions at all? This is Jillian Forrester who is thanking Greg for the detailed and candid account of your research trajectory but also that leads into a question about the section on documentary sources which is such an excellent resource and there doesn't seem to be any commentary on the authority of the sources you provide I wonder whether that might be problematic the example you showed was Walter Thornbury's biography of Turner which is typically regarded as being unreliable and that might be misleading but I may have misunderstood the method behind providing those resources Yes, no I haven't provided commentary on the reliability or otherwise that may well be something in the future the specific example of Thornbury's that he is quite unreliable but as I mentioned in the text in a couple of occasions he was extremely reliable in relation to Goethe and so I have commented in visual areas about his general fund reliability and quoted exact examples where he is very reliable but that's one of the areas in which the documents section can be developed in the future and that's something I would seriously consider Is it right that the documents are provided as fully as possible I mean it isn't just little gobbits I'll try to translate it so Thornbury's is about 10,000 words so yes there are Roget's book on watercolours not the bits that relate to Goethe Sarah Thank you so much Greg and the discussion is so fascinating lots to think about about digital websites being complications and also conditioned by particular moments in time but my question is prompted by your evocation of the user and I was really interested that you've given that quite a lot of thought and imagined people using this resource and you spoke about users who perhaps are not professional art historians or curators but people who occupy or are researching for pleasure or their own interests or maybe not being paid to it as well so I was just kind of thinking about the different uses of this research and perhaps the digital allowing that through open access but my question really is about how a new generation or a younger generation meet Goethe and whether you've given that some thought about this catalogue providing a new pathway into material which might seem increasingly distant unfamiliar even a term like watercolour the materiality might not be quite as familiar as it is to many people in this room so I just wondered and perhaps talking about this comic as well and other responses to the material how you've been thinking about new audiences meeting Goethe I think younger audiences will be Goethe online, that's a fact that at the same time older audiences will increasingly have to meet Goethe online because galleries are I'm thinking particularly of certain regional galleries where I grew up and known to to love watercolours are increasingly keeping their collections in stores whether that's for conservation reason it's part of the case but also a great commitment contemporary art features very heavily in local galleries and I've actually found in aside from issues to do with access to works of art and pandemic it is increasingly difficult to see works in watercolours and flesh so I think that inevitably young people will turn to the internet where they have a wonderful resource I do have a problem though and that's actually and I try to take this in the final paragraph I think it's presumptuous to try and persuade yourself that you know the audience it's up to the audience to make themselves known to you in the digital world that is I mean I can't presume who is going to use the site but I can respond to those who do use it I mean in that sense I feel it's my response is more reflective and prescriptive which is what I was trying to say in the final section I've done my bit I've tried to make it as open as possible and now I'm going to reflect back on it again and it'll be interesting to see that data where and who and all those things which again are not perfect but something Google analytics on the site can give us a snapshot of use and a profile of the user and that's something in putting it together I have absolutely no understanding but it's just beyond my comprehension I cannot be able to understand what the potential is Well on that note of hope and of that clear pointer to the site's potential I think we can finish there Thanks everyone for all your questions and the discussion but thanks most of all Greg that was a wonderful introduction to the site Thank you so much