Qıntessentıal

Collections online · templated · powered by Qi

Your collection, online, in minutes.

A woman in a red headscarf and dark coat passes outside a grey French window, seen through its panes between white lace curtains, with snow and green shrubs beyond.
A nude woman with loose red hair, seen from behind, throws herself into deep green water, her pale body arched forward as white foam breaks in curling crests around her.
A bearded old man hangs tied to a rough wooden cross in a dark space, lit hard from the left. A bare-shouldered man on a ladder reaches up to untie him while a soldier in steel armour and an old woman look up from below.
An oval portrait against near black: a young man with dark curling hair turns towards us in a dark cloak and grey scarf, a gold chain and medallion across his chest.
A young girl sits facing us in a white dress with a blue-trimmed lace collar and a wide grey skirt, a few red flowers held in her lap, against a pale grey wall with a flowering shrub behind her shoulder.
Two barefoot women in pink and white robes stand among slim tree trunks on ground painted flat rose-pink, one raising a hand, while a third figure in yellow sits with her back to us on the green grass beyond.

Qintessential is a ready-made public or private website for museums, archives and private collections. Works, artists, archive hierarchies, and themes, all published straight from your Qi CMS, with nothing to build.

And something no collections site usually offers: visitors sign in, save works, and build portfolios of their own to annotate, export and share.

The catalogue

Browse, search, filter.

Faceted listings for every record type, with stable URLs, sort options, bookmarking and a search that reads every published field.

The Marlowe Collection
WorksArchiveArtistsThemes

Works

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TypeAll types
ArtistAll artists
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DateFrom — To
22 works Sorted by · Artist

    Artwork detail

    All the details, at a glance.

    Any number of image (with their credit lines), the fields you choose to publish, linked artists, themes and keywords — and the two actions that matter: enquire, or save it.

    Back to works 01 / 22

    Themes

      Enquire Save to portfolio

      Artists

      Artists & makers.

      Every name in the catalogue gets a page of its own: dates, biography, and all their works, assembled automatically, never maintained twice.

      Artists

      Filter artists by name…
      17 artists Sorted by · Name

        Themes

        Themes tell the story.

        Group works into experiences with their own description and cover, then let visitors walk the collection in a curated way.

        Themes

        • Land and Water 6 works

          Rivers, coasts and the edges between them, across four centuries of landscape.

        • Devotional Objects 4 works

          Painted panels, reliquaries and prints made for private prayer.

        • Line and Gesture 5 works

          Drawings and studies where the hand is still visible in the mark.

        Members and portfolios

        Sign in. Save works. Share a portfolio.

        Visitors create a profile in seconds, bookmark works as they browse, group them into named portfolios, choose which fields to show, then export a PDF or share a link. Curators, teachers and researchers stop screenshotting your site and start citing it.

        All portfolios Cristiano Bianchi

        Portfolio · 2 works

        Paper and Light

        Edit Fields Export PDF Share

          “Same cropping instinct in both of these, thirty years apart — worth pairing for the seminar.”

          • Profiles in seconds

            No approval queue, no CMS licence.

          • Any number of portfolios

            A seminar, a loan shortlist, a personal favourite dozen.

          • Choose the fields

            Portfolio owners decide which metadata travels with each work.

          • Export PDF or share

            One revocable link, or a formatted PDF with full metadata and rights.

          • Quiet audience insight

            See which works are saved most often — consented, aggregate, useful.

          Archive

          Hierarchies, not just grids.

          Fonds, series, boxes and items keep their structure and reference codes online. Seamlessly browse finding aids and individual items.

          Archive tree

          Marlowe Family Papers
          KT100
          Series 1 · Correspondence
          KT100/01
          Box 92
          KT100/01/01
          Letters to G. Richmond
          KT100/01/01/01
          Series 2 · Exhibition files
          KT100/02

          1. Collection

          Marlowe Family Papers

          Details Catalogued records (148)

          Correspondence, exhibition files and photographs documenting four generations of collecting, 1878–1994.

          Dates
          1878 – 1994
          Extent
          14 boxes, 148 catalogued records
          Reference code
          KT100
          Related people
          Richmond, George (3 works)

          Included

          Everything in the template.

          Nine capabilities every collections site needs, built once and maintained for everyone — you choose type, colour and layout.

          • Faceted browsing

            Works, archive, artists and themes, each with filters, sort orders and stable URLs.

          • Images done properly

            Multiple views per record, responsive sizes, captions and credit lines, with download rules driven by your rights data.

          • Themes and stories

            Curated groupings and long-form pages that pull live records in, so captions never go stale.

          • Archive hierarchies

            ISAD(G) and DACS structure preserved online: fonds, series, boxes and items.

          • Enquiries

            Per-record enquiry forms routed to the right inbox, logged back into Qi.

          • Fast on any device

            Responsive imagery and static delivery keep pages quick on a phone in a gallery basement.

          • Accessible by default

            WCAG 2.2 AA out of the box, with keyboard navigation, contrast, alt-text workflow, screen-reader tested.

          • Found and cited

            Clean semantic markup, sitemaps and persistent URLs so search engines index you and researchers can cite you.

          • Your identity

            Logo, colour palette and homepage composition controlled in the CMS. No front-end work.

          Powered by Qi

          One catalogue behind it all.

          Qintessential is the publishing layer on Qi, Keepthinking's collections management system, used by museums, archives, libraries and private estates worldwide. Cataloguing, media, rights and loans stay in Qi; Qintessential is a live view of them. Publish a correction at 11am and it is live at 11am.

          Already on Qi? Qintessential can launch on your existing data, with no migration.

          More about Qi
          A laptop shows a Qi dashboard for an art museum, with a February 2024 calendar of exhibition openings and a storage panel beside it; behind it a tablet of archival photograph thumbnails, and two phones in front — one listing 347 selected records, the other an orange Qute sign-in screen.
          One source of truth
          The site reads your live catalogue: no export, no second database to reconcile.
          Publish per field
          Decide what goes public at collection, record and field level, with embargo dates and sensitivity flags.
          Rights aware
          Qi rights records drive what can be shown, downloaded or reused, automatically.
          Open by API
          Qi itself exposes a REST API for your own apps, gallery screens and research partners — the website sits alongside it, not in front of it.
          Hosted and maintained
          Keepthinking runs infrastructure, backups, updates and accessibility audits.

          Show us your collection. We'll show you the site.

          hello@qintessential.com

          Get a demo

          Tell us about your collection.

          Thirty minutes, a look at your data, and a demo site seeded with your own records.

          Or write to hello@qintessential.com