THEY are all paintings I’d never seen before.

Which even though I’ve been in pretty much every town hall and public gallery in Kirklees over the years, is hardly surprising.

For Kirklees, like every other council up and down the land, has far more publicly owned treasures than it can ever display at any one time.

This week I’ve popped in to Dewsbury library, Huddersfield art gallery, the Colne Valley Museum, Batley art gallery and Meltham town hall – all without leaving my desk.

It’s all thanks to a new discovery of mine, a website called Your Paintings. And that’s what it is, quite literally, an online catalogue of thousands of publicly owned pictures.

The website has been created thanks to a partnership between the BBC and a charity called The Public Catalogue Foundation.

Together they hope to display 200,000 paintings on the website.

The charity estimates that 80% of the nation’s painting collection is in storage and that two-thirds of it has never been photographed.

In my wander through the on-line collection, I lingered over a few Kirklees treasures I never knew were there.

A boy in short trousers walks up a steep lane in The Road Out Of Holmfirth by the English painter Carel Victor Morlais Weight.

At his side is a woman in black carrying a basket, their steps taking them higher into the stone-walled green hills, tight with cottages. Hills that we all know so well.

I was fascinated too by the scene being played out in Lady Swooning by Tihamér von Margitay.

It’s a cafe or inn and there is indeed a lady swooning watched over by a fierce looking military man with big side whiskers and a dramatic, red-lined great coat. There are men in top hats, ladies in frothy, extravagant headgear.

William Strutt’s wonderfully named Stocks Closed Firmly with an Upward Tendency, shows a girl trying to free her beau from the stocks while the man you suppose should be guarding him lies in a nearby doorway, quite possibly drunk.

My other prize was The Birthday Present, Algernon Mayow Talmage’s picture of a girl on a grey horse which could have been painted in no other era than the 20s.

Log on, have a wander and see just how much more accessible art can be. I can’t wait to go back.