Science Museum Art Collection

The Science Museum Art Collection contains over 8,000 works and some 280 oil paintings relating to the history of science, technology and medicine from the antique to the contemporary.

Now these oil paintings and more can be seen digitally thanks to BBC's Your Paintings - a joint initiative between the BBC, the Public Catalogue Foundation (a registered charity) and participating collections and museums from across the country.

Notable bequests to the Museum include the Penn-Gaskell collection featuring ballooning and aeronautics, and the Woodcroft collection containing portraits from the Patent Office Museum.

HMS Experiment by Joesph Marshall

The collection also features 80 oil portraits, mostly of scientists and engineers such as Isaac Newton, James Watt and Richard Arkwright. One of the newest acquisitions is a portrait of Stephen Hawking by Yolanda Sonnabend.

Stephen Hawking by Yolanda Sonnabend
© Yolanda Sonnabend

Other paintings in the collection include Coalbrookdale by Night by De Loutherbourg, A Manufacturing Town by L.S. Lowry, The Munitions Girls, 1918 by Stanhope Forbes and a portrait of Man Holding a Watch from about 1560, attributed to Italian mannerist painter Tommaso Manzuoli.

Some artworks in the collection, including some large murals created for the Museum in the 1950s and 60s, are no longer on display at the Museum, so the best way to see them is online.

See the paintings