The National Portrait Gallery holds the world’s most significant public collection of Tudor and Jacobean paintings. Between 2007 and 2012, its transformative research project ‘Making Art in Tudor Britain’ generated unprecedented heritage-science data on 120 portraits from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A central element of the project was the taking of paint samples, mounted as cross-sections, to investigate paint composition and structure. However, images and detailed metadata from these cross-sections are not currently in formats suitable for broad dissemination.

The missing piece: sharing cross-sections from the ‘Making Art in Tudor Britain’ project is a research initiative supported by Heritage Science Data Service Small Grants Programme. You will take a key role delivering the project, with responsibility to identify cross-sections produced during the original research; extract relevant metadata from the reports; re-photograph samples; review and align metadata with the new images; and prepare the full dataset for sharing with HSDS for wider dissemination.