So after two weeks of oil paintings, the Persephone Post returns to the kitchen and we shall have a week of domestic objects. Here is a chair designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1903. It has been imitated countless times yet the original has an inimitable quality and is quite unlike any other chair in the world. It is also a classic in the sense that you could imagine anyone in any of our books sitting on it, male, female, affluent, less well off, it would suit every household.

Again from the Northumberland volume: Norman Stansfield Cornish b 1919 Self Portrait in Northumbria University Gallery. This would have been perfect for Little Boy Lost, except we love the picture we have so much. One effect of this PCF fortnight (do look at their website, it has just launched another exciting initiative) has been to make us want to publish more Classics; or at least to use these amazing paintings in one way or another. Of course we can put them on the front of the PB. But that is only twice a year and in any case this autumn we will have a black and white photograph of suffragettes (to accompany our suffragette novel). We'll definitely have more PCF paintings inside the PB. And perhaps we should do more cards. Or simply postcards. But really we are a book publisher! Well, it's a happy dilemma. And meanwhile we urge you to get some of the volumes, which are incredibly good value, or at least browse their website; and to go to the hundreds of provincial galleries of course. Persephone Books' next trip is to Penzance, to the Penlee House Gallery and Museum in a week's time, where we shall be on Saturday June 4th after giving a talk at the amazing Morrab Library; Penlee House is home to the Newylyn School paintings and in particular to Harold Harvey's, some of which have featured on the Post during the last two years – and may feature again the week after next!

And finally from the PCF volumes, two pictures from Northumberland, Tees Valley & Tyne and Wear: this is Still Life with Bowl, Spoon and Apples 1913 by Mark Gertler and it's at the Hatton Gallery. This couple of weeks of exploring the PCF in detail has made us - well, not exactly indignant because the Foundation itself is doing an amazing thing, but thoughtful and concerned and a tad bewildered. In exactly the same way that thousands of extraordinary books disappear, so thousands of amazing paintings are hidden, forgotten, locked away, overlooked, whatever you like to call it. There would be a case for insisting by law that there were two or three museums spread over the UK that had changing exhibitions drawn from all the public galleries up and down the country; or there would at least be a case for insisting that the galleries themselves had to display the work on a rotating basis rather than leaving it in a basement. This is obviously a subject about which art historians know a huge amount and we at Persephone Books are mere beginners. But the PCF provokes a lot of hard thinking.

Somerset p62, the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath (where there will be a Persephone walk on June 16th). This is Gainsborough The Byam Family painted in the mid-1760s.

Portrait of a Woman 1931 by Arnold Mason (1885-1963) is at the Newark and Sherwood Museum Service (p. 240 of the Nottinghamshire volume) – so perfect for a Persephone Classic, maybe we should do some more...

Another week of PCF volumes, but of course these pictures are only the tip of the iceberg: there are thousands and thousands of other wonderful paintings within the thirty-five or so volumes (so far). Here is a detail from Ken Howard's Billingsgate Market 1962, also taken from the The City of London volume.

And this is William Marlow (1740-1813) View of Ludgate Street from Ludgate Hill, with the West Front of St Paul's Cathedral, London which, The City of London PCF volume tells us, is at the Bank of England (this has apparently 'accumulated a sizeable collection of oil paintings through bequests, gifts, commissions or purchase'). A look at this photograph shows that in a way things haven't changed much: St Paul's is still there, and the curve of the street. Our favourite tea place, Bea's of Bloomsbury, has recently opened a branch nearby.

The Tyne & Wear Museums volume: The Three Brothers, the Sons of Thomas Dallas attributed to George Watson (1767-1837) is at Shipley Art Gallery which, according to the PCF, 'has one of the finest provincial collections of Dutch and Flemish sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings in the UK' as well as some fine Victorian paintings and watercolours, prints and drawings, sculpture and decorative art. For us southerners the realisation of what glories are held in a museum like the Shipley – that we have never seen – is sobering indeed.

Today it's Derbyshire p.145, Désire Leroy and Julie Palmyre Van Marcke-Robert Still Life, Fruit and Flowers 1866 Royal Crown Derby Museum Trust. It is clear from this and this that both women were professional painters. And wonderful gardeners. Inspired by Diana Athill, who grows blue morning glory from seed every year, we are trying our best, but the seedlings that flourished indoors in pots are unfortunately not doing so well in the garden. (Sixty or seventy years later Vanessa Bell also did a wonderful flower painting, which Jane Brocket has put up here in a clever and imaginative post that imagines herself doing a grand tour.)

Another painting from the Gloucestershire and Wiltshire volume: First Lady Mayor of Wilton Edith Oliver (1872-1948) by Rex Whistler. Edith Olivier is nowadays best-known for being Rex Whistler's closest friend, but she was indeed Mayor, and a novelist. This painting is at Wilton Town Council. Can someone write and tell us if it is on view (in the council chamber perhaps)?

At Persephone we have long been huge fans of the Public Catalogue Foundation, which is a charity with the slogan 'Discover the Paintings you Own'. The man who set it up, Dr Fred Hohler, realised that there were thousands of paintings in public ownership that the public never sees. As he says here: 'The United Kingdom holds in its galleries and civic buildings arguably the greatest publicly owned collection of paintings in the world. However, an alarming four in five of these paintings are not on view.' The aim of the PCF is therefore to make a record of paintings in public ownership; to make these accessible through affordable catalogues and, eventually, online; and to raise funds to do this. At 59 Lamb's Conduit Street we used to buy every catalogue as it became available, but seem to have been asleep for the last three years. Now we have caught up and a dozen incredible volumes arrived at the shop last week. For the next fortnight the Post will celebrate the PCF. Here to start with is a painting from the Gloucestershire and Wiltshire volume: the Swindon Art Gallery owns The Printer c. 1915 by Laura Sylvia Gosse (1881-1968). Can anyone tell us if this unwieldy looking machine is the same kind of thing as the 'small handpress' Leonard and Virginia Woolf bought in Holborn one March afternoon in 1917 in order to set up the Hogarth Press?

Three people very kindly wrote to us about this painting. Here is what they said: ‘The Woolfs' first press was much smaller and much more manageable. It was a small tabletop press - called an "Eclipse". They didn't purchase anything quite so unwieldy as the one in the painting for a few years.’ ‘Laura Sylvia Gosse was a prolific printmaker – she gave many of her prints to the British Museum Dept. of Prints & Drawings, which has an impression of the print after the painting you show on your post – probably printed on the press in the painting.' (This is now here.)’ ‘The etching press, which is not painted with mechanical symmetry, although pinholes are visible from the back of the canvas where a compass point has pricked it at the centre of the two wheels, is balanced by the figure. Although not a self portrait (the girl posing at the press is a model), this painting certainly has an autobiographical element.' Swindon Collection of Twentieth Century British Art (1991) 'It shows Sylvia Gosses's own press in her studio near the Cumberland Haymarket here’ This was in a block of studios just east of Regents Park in London, where William Roberts also had a studio.

And this is a stone head of Persephone in the Ashmolean in Oxford. (Or rather it is labelled Persephone, and indeed her rather anguished expression makes that very likely, but how do explorers/archaeologists know that when they dig it up?)

When Demeter asked Zeus to allow Persephone to come back from the underworld he said that she could only do so if she had not eaten anything. But of course she had eaten pomegranate seeds. So for six months of the year she had to remain married to Hades. This c. 440 BC Greek vase in the British Museum shows Persephone and Hades banqueting.

And here is Persephone's mother. She can be seen round the corner from Lamb's Conduit Street at the British Museum: Marble Figure of Demeter c. 350 BC was discovered at Knidos in Turkey.

There is an article in the new Biannually about Persephone in Sicily (cf. the Post for the beginning of January this year). This week on the Post: other images of Persephone. The best book on her was by Gunther Zuntz in 1971. But (as we find out every day from google alerts) there are many other appropriations of her name, including a restaurant in New York, a magazine, a theatre in Saskatoon in Canada and a character in Upstairs, Downstairs (she is called Persie, the 'real life' one we know is called Sephie). Here is a head of Persephone at the musee d'art et d'histoire in Geneva taken from maicar.com.

The final London garden for the week is the painting of the swing seat that is on the front of the current Biannually: Alice Ashley on a Green Seat 1937 by Donald Chisholm Towner (1903-85). Alice Ashley was the artist's neighbour at 20 Frognal Gardens, Hampstead: he lived at 8 Church Row, round the corner. The Geffrye Museum catalogue is particularly interesting about this painting, especially when it points out: 'The seat alone tells us that this is a comfortably well-off household, most likely well run and organised. Covered seats such as this one required both time and energy to put up and down. They were often taken in each evening, to preserve the fabric from the elements, and this type of domestic routine is only possible when one's life is ordered, regular.' Too true – a swing seat rather implies that one person does the contented sitting and another person takes in the cushions and puts them out again. Which is not how life is nowadays for most of us. But you can still get 'a swinging garden sofa' here, in fact if you browse through the site you will find they have used the picture of Alice Ashley to illustrate the bliss of swing seats.

Child in a Garden, with his little Horse and Cart 1840 by Charles Robert Leslie (1794-1859) is almost certainly his own garden at 12 Pine Apple Place, Edgware Road, London. This is George Dunlop Leslie (1835-1921) who also became a well-known painter. He recalled that his father 'had a very pretty habit of going int the garden before breakfast and picking either a honeysuckle or a rose – his favourite flowers – and putting them in a glass on the mantel shelf in his painting room. I hardly ever saw his room in the summer without these flowers, and we have a little sketch of a rose, which he picked and brought into the house so gently that he did not disturb the beautiful little moth on it' (Geffrye Museum catalogue p.60, taken from Autobiographical Recollections by the late Charles Robert Leslie 1860).

A London Garden 1904 by Thomas Natthews Rooke (1842-1942) on p. 141 of the Geffrye Museum catalogue, which calls this 'an unpretentious and affectionate view of a fairly large garden; it may in fact be Rooke's own at 7 Queen Anne's Gardens in Bedford Park. He has framed his composition most unusually; this is not a straightforward topographical rendering... There is no specific viewpoint; instead, the viewer is asked to wander around the image, as one might do in such a garden...shown in early Spring...Tall bearded irises and bluebells drift into clumps of red tulips and purple aquilegia... and a small apple tree breaking into blossom' (which is how hundreds of London gardens look at the moment).

The great event in the UK was of course The Wedding and in our little corner of North London we had a lunch party with the neighbours in the communal part of the gardens. The rest of the weekend was rather communal too as we pruned, clipped, mowed, seeded, planted out, watered, chatted over the fence with the neighbours – and, mostly, sat and read our books (in my case the extraordinary There Were No Windows for the book group tomorrow evening - newcomers welcome, just ring and let us know). This painting is The Chalon Family in London c. 1800 by the Swiss painter Jacques-Laurent Agasse (1767-1849). It's of the back garden at 8 Church Lane, Kensington and was the star of the show at the Geffrye Museum Home and Garden exhibition in 2003 © Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman.