Terry Grimley discovers some local artistic treasures as he turns the pages of an ambitious catalogue.

The Public Catalogue Foundation’s astonishing project to publish a complete illustrated catalogue of oil, tempera and acrylic paintings in UK public collections has taken another step forward with the arrival of the Warwickshire volume.

Added to existing volumes covering Birmingham, Staffordshire (including the Black Country) and Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, it means that armchair art lovers can get a much better overview of art collections across the West Midlands than they ever could by travelling around them, given the national statistic that only one in five paintings in our museums and galleries is on display.

The Public Catalogue Foundation is both a very ambitious idea and a surprisingly old-fashioned one, in that it is being produced as a series of weighty and attractive books (27 of them so far) before it is published online. In this case around 2,000 paintings are illustrated in colour over 300 pages.

At first glance you might expect Warwickshire to be a low-key area for art, even though the county has been defined, idiosyncratically, as including Coventry. But idiosyncrasy, it turns out, is the defining theme for art in Shakespeare’s county.

It is a county which boasts some extraordinarily contrasting specialist collections. In particular there is art relating to Shakespeare himself on the one hand (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Shakespeare Institute, Royal Shakespeare Company Collection), and the motor car on the other (Coventry Museum of British Road Transport, Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust, British Motor Industry Heritage Trust). The University of Warwick collection – particularly useful to have brought together here as it scattered across the campus – has a focus on postwar abstract painting.

The definition of a public collection includes Kenilworth Castle, which is owned by English Heritage, but excludes National Trust properties which are equally accessible to the public. So there is no sign of Upton House, which houses an important old master collection including an El Greco, a real rarity for a British collection.

There is much more art in Warwickshire than there would have been even 10 years ago because of the addition of Compton Verney, which opened as recently as 2004.

Bankrolled by the Peter Moores Foundation, it has arguably been Britain’s most richly endowed public art collection in the 21st century, in 2006 acquiring two Canalettos which were under threat of export without recourse to the usual charitable funds.

The Compton Verney collection already totals around 130 paintings divided between four seemingly random themes – British Folk Art (the former Andras Kalman Collection of Naive Art, acquired in one go in 1993), Neapolitan Art 1600-1800, Northern European art 1450-1650 and British portraits.

To put Compton Verney’s exceptional purchasing power into perspective, consider this. The one major old master painting owned by the city of Coventry is the vast Bacchus and Ariadne by Luca Giordano (1634-1705), given to the city in 1855 by a local MP, who acquired it in settlement of a gambling debt.

Five years after opening to the public Compton Verney already owns four Giordanos, two of which were bought last year. In fact, no fewer than eight old master paintings were bought for Compton Verney during 2008.

The story of Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery has been altogether more penny-pinching. In fact Coventry must have one of the most disappointing public art collections in the country for a city of its size (for comparison, its population is about 30 per cent larger than that of Southampton, which is generally regarded as having one of the best).

Coventry came late to the public art gallery scene (the Herbert opened as late as 1957) and seemingly without great political enthusiasm. Briefly at the centre of national attention around 1960 with the opening of the new Cathedral, featuring highly-publicised commissions from Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Jacob Epstein, the city should have gone on to build a complimentary, and nationally important, collection of contemporary art, but provincialism prevailed.

When an abstract painting by Ben Nicholson was bought in 1963 it provoked an outcry in the local press. While a few things – a Stanley Spencer portrait, an unusually large LS Lowry landscape – rise above mediocrity, it is difficult not to feel, leafing through this mix of drab social realism and unfortunate gifts, that the figure of four out of five paintings being in store is about right in the Herbert’s case.

Fortunately, two small town collections, in Leamington and Rugby, make a brighter impression. I’m particularly fond of the Leamington gallery, which moved to a new home at the Royal Pump Rooms in 1999, with its lively mixed displays of mainly early 20th century and contemporary art.

Its most adventurous recent acquisitions by artists like Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn and Gillian Wearing, are excluded from the catalogue as they are in media other than painting, but it is interesting to note the strengths of the collection – not only 30 paintings by Leamington’s own mid-19th century landscape painter Thomas Baker, but seven by that intriguing early 20th century decorative painter William Cayley Robinson.

Thanks to a bequest there is also a handful of fine 17th century Dutch paintings, including a memorable candlelit self-portrait by Godfried Schalcken.

Like Leamington, Rugby also punches well above its weight, having had the vision to begin a public collection in 1946, long before there was a gallery to house it. A succession of freelance experts has been brought in to advise on acquisitions, resulting in a collection featuring such notables as Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, L.S.Lowry, Harold Cohen, Prunella Clough, Leon Kossoff, Craigie Aitchison and Paula Rego.

After spending 15 years on loan to the University of Warwick, the collection finally found a permanent home when the new Rugby Art Gallery and Museum opened in 2000.

The university’s own collection features some big and bold abstract paintings by the likes of Gillian Ayres, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and John Hoyland, plus the Canadian Jack Bush and American Gene Davis. As a counterweight to these, the university inherited an earlier collection formed by the former Coventry College of Education, which it absorbed in 1979, consisting of generally more conservative, figurative work.

And so to those paintings of cars and Shakespeare. Actually the cars needn’t detain us long, as from an artistic point of view they rarely inspire much above the level of illustration. A rare exception is Bryan Organ’s amusing portrait of an elderly gallery attendant guarding a painting of a Daimler, from the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust, which has been selected for the book’s cover.

The Shakespeare-related collections are another matter. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has some quirky pictures, including a rare early 16th century painting of two jesters called We Three Loggerheads (one of them is holding a carved wooden head).

The RSC collection, much larger than I realised, contains the largest surviving body of works from the Boydell Gallery, a late 18th century artistic project to illustrate the works of Shakespeare which incorporated many well-known artists. There are paintings from this period by Henry Fuseli, Francis Wheatley and George Romney. Twentieth century paintings include portraits of Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft and Antony Sher’s self-portrait as The Fool in King Lear.

Several of the Warwickshire art collections have benefited from major building projects in the last decade. The RSC has its hands full at the moment with getting the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre up and running, but perhaps at some point someone should address the question of how its collections could be rehoused to make a greater contribution to Stratford’s tourist economy.