Terry Grimley takes a stroll through the complete public art collections of Staffordshire, courtesy of the Public Catalogue Foundation.

The amazing lottery-funded project by the Public Catalogue Foundation to publish a fully illustrated catalogue of all the oil paintings in Britain’s public art collections has so far produced two volumes for the West Midlands.

Back in April I reviewed the Birmingham catalogue, and now I have been catching up with the previous volume dedicated to Staffordshire. A single volume for the West Midlands Metropolitan County would presumably have been too unwieldy, so the PCF has chosen to ignore it and work instead to old-fashioned county borders.

This means that Walsall, Sandwell and Wolverhampton, all officially now part of West Midlands, have been restored to Staffordshire alongside Lichfield and the Potteries. Coventry and Dudley, also part of West Midlands, must presumably wait for future volumes devoted to Warwickshire and Worcestershire respectively.

Compared to Birmingham, where the combination of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts provides a substantial body of old master and international art of national importance, Staffordshire’s collections have a much more parochial feeling.

In fact, the international dimension is almost exclusively focused on the two metropolitan collections of Walsall and Wolverhampton. In the former case it was the gift of the Garman-Ryan Collection in 1972 which provided such foreign gems as the early portrait by Degas of his sister or Robert Delaunay’s 1918 portrait of Stravinsky.

At Wolverhampton, the Pop Art collection introduced an American contingent which is extremely rare in British public collections outside London – although as it happens most of these are in media other than oil (or acrylic, which is also covered in these catalogues), so that Roy Lichtenstein’s Purist Painting with Bottles, said to be one of the artist’s favourites among his own paintings, stands in splendid isolation.

Increasingly, Wolverhampton’s lively post-1970s tradition of collecting contemporary art has focused on photography rather than painting, and as a general observation it is striking how poorly represented the main trends in later 20th century British painting are in these collections, particularly since the 1960s.

In total there are 2,500 paintings in this volume, from 34 diverse collections across Staffordshire. The big three collections are Walsall, Wolverhampton and the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, while the smallest include Leek Town Council and Erasmus Darwin House, with just one and four paintings each.

The regular PCF format is to illustrate each painting in colour to the same small standard size, with outstanding works pulled out for additional full-page treatment.

It’s an unfamiliar way of looking at museum collections where, as everyone knows, there is usually only room for a fraction of the works to be on public display and a significant proportion are of such indifferent quality that they are unlikely ever to leave the storerooms.

Here, this state of affairs is replaced by a ruthless democracy in which everything in a particular collection is given equal prominence in alphabetical order.

Any narrative which curators might wish to impose on their best works is erased, and you can study the strength and weaknesses of public art collecting across Staffordshire in intricate detail, without leaving your armchair.

In the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, where paintings play a secondary role to the nationally important ceramics collection, it’s apparent that the main strength lies in British artists from the first half of the 20th century.

In fact, the biggest single discovery for me in this catalogue was the work of John Currie (1883-1914), a Staffordshire-born artist who worked as a designer for Mintons as a teenager and then became part of the dazzling generation of young modernists who studied at the Slade School in the years just before the First World War.

Currie’s promising career came to an abrupt end in a tragic incident in which he killed his mistress and then took his own life.

Six years ago the Potteries Museum staged an exhibition in collaboration with the Tate in which Currie’s work was shown alongside examples by his better-known Slade contemporaries including Mark Gertler (of whom there is a portrait by Currie in the collection) and CRW Nevinson.

Over a period of around 30 years between the 1930s and 1960s the Potteries Museum acquired no fewer than 20 paintings by Currie from a variety of sources, including one given by the Potteries novelist Arnold Bennett, Coincidentally, Bennett also owned Nevinson’s war painting La Patrie, which was later given by the Cadbury family to Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in the 1980s.

The Potteries museum & Art gallery obviously has a tendency to collect individual local artists in depth. There are 52 paintings by Alfonso Toft (1866-1964), who seems to have set himself the task of painting a view of every castle in Britain, and 41 by his similarly long-lived near-contemporary James Cartlidge (1868- 1961), whose academic late-Victorian style seems to have been lightened by Impressionism and who painted a few landcsapes in America.

Many of Britain’s public collections were created through the generosity of Victorian benefactors.

A case in point is Wednesbury Museum & Art Gallery, now part of Sandwell Museums Service, which opened in 1891 to display a large collection formed by local industrialist Edwin Richards and his wife, who bequeathed £2,000 towards the cost of the building.

By 1930 the collection had grown to 355 works, but in 1948 it was decided to sell the fine art collection, and today only 54 works survive from the Richards bequest. probably the most illustrious names represented in the collection today are David Roberts and Benjamin Williams Leader.

Otherwise it’s a listless mix of local views and portraits of Black Country worthies by anonymous artists which strikes a slightly doleful and anachronistic note.

It might be tempting to say something similar about the Staffordshire Arts and Museums Service collection were it not for some fresh recent additions, including perhaps the biggest surprise in the whole catalogue – a series of nine “portraits” of Staffordshire-made shoes commissioned from the fashionable, Saatchi-collected painter Lisa Milroy in 2002.

Curiously, a painting (or group of small paintings) by Milroy in Wolverhampton Art Gallery has been omitted from the catalogue completely, not even figuring in the “Paintings without illustrations” appendix.

One thing which does strike you about North Staffordshire is that artists seem to have been more enthusiastic about recording the industrial scene than they have in Birmingham and the Black Country. Perhaps there is something about bottle kilns which made the Potteries more picturesque.

But the great exception to prove that rule is Edwin Butler Bayliss (1874-1950), who seems to have been unique in finding visual poetry in the sheer blackness, relieved by flashes of fire, of the Black Country in its full early 20th century vigour. Bayliss is overdue for a definitive exhibition, but meanwhile this catalogue provides an opportunity to see all 19 paintings by him in the collection of Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

* Oil Paintings in Public Ownership in Staffordshire is published by the Public Catalogue Foundation at £20 (soft cover) and £35 (hard cover). For further information about this and other volumes in the series, visit the website at www.thepcf.org.uk