More than 1,200 artworks still missing in Aberdeen

Concerns were raised about missing artefacts four years ago

More than 1,200 artefacts and artworks remain missing from Aberdeen City Council's collection, almost four years after an investigation started into lost gallery and museum items.

It emerged in 2021 that objects worth almost £200,000 could not be found.

Since then, only 126 have been located.

Aberdeen City Council said its Aberdeen Archives, Gallery and Museums adhered to nationally agreed standards for collections management.

The objects still to be found are worth an estimated £166,000.

In November 2021, more than 1,300 items were recorded as missing from Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums collection.

At the time the council said it was "optimistic" many of the items would be found, blaming a suspected recording error during the refurbishment of the art gallery.

More than 684 artefacts - including a Neolithic stone axe - along with 400 antiques, which include ancient Chinese ornaments, have still to be traced.

About 120 items have now been classified as stolen including a purple velvet evening bag.

The council's culture spokesperson, councillor Martin Grieg, said "considerable efforts" had been made to make sure staff knew what was within the collection.

He told BBC Radio Scotland's Lunchtime Live programme: "There are occasions where artefacts are stored and not properly indexed.

"We have put in place a very robust system of making sure we have up to date reports and records of all the items in the collection.

"There will be a proportion that have been stolen, a proportion will have been misfiled, in the wrong place or mis-labelled, so there is work underway to find out exactly what we have and where."

Aberdeen City Council said it had published information on the missing items on its emuseum site.

In 2022, the authority said the losses had happened over many years and even decades.

Only about 10% of the items currently recorded as missing have been photographed, and some may have been mislaid during the moving of large sections of the collection.