Support
Supporting Saints Oil Paintings
One editor, funded by reproductions, no login
This catalogue is free to read, has no account to create and sets no tracker. It includes commercial links to hand-painted reproductions sold by its publisher, Art & See. Those sales support the catalogue.
The cost is not really the servers. It is the reading. Sorting saints out of an art collection cannot be automated, because the words do not behave.
Why this particular subject is slow work
Saints are also places
Of 611 works in the list this catalogue started from, 206 turned out to match a place name rather than a figure. Saint-Mammes is a village on the Loing where Sisley painted thirty-eight landscapes. Mont Sainte-Victoire is a mountain. Saint-Paul is the asylum at Saint-Rémy. Every one of those had to be read and thrown out by hand.
The attribute has to be seen
A museum record frequently says "Female Saint" and nothing more. Deciding whether the object in her hand is a tower, a wheel or a jar means looking at the picture, and there is no field in any database that answers it.
Records move
Attributions are revised, works are sold, galleries renumber their rooms. Keeping the location and the attribution current means going back to the institutional record rather than trusting the copy taken last year.
Two things that genuinely help
Buy a reproduction
Every entry for a public-domain work links to a hand-painted reproduction of it. That link is the only revenue this site has, and it is what pays for the hosting and the hours. There is no subscription tier and no donation form.
Send a correction
A message that names an entry and says what is wrong with the identification is worth more than money here, because it is the one thing that cannot be bought. Corrections go in with the date they were made.
There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to cancel. If this catalogue was useful for identifying a figure you were stuck on, that was the point of building it.