AI Profile: Harriet Bridgeman, president, The Bridgeman Art Library

She is a viscountess, married for over 40 years to the third viscount, but she is universally known as Harriet Bridgeman with no lapse of respect at all. In the publishing, art and museum worlds Harriet is close to royalty.

She is the creator and now president of the Bridgeman Art Library whose publicity boasts of it being “the world’s leading source of fine art, cultural and historical images”, and nobody argues with that.

At the touch of a keyboard button the Bridgeman has more than a quarter of a million images available, representing 29,000 artists and 8,000 collections. Every subject, theme and style is covered, from 15,000 BC to now, there’s portrait photography, maps, architecture, furniture and ceramics, and even anthropological bits and pieces. Started in London 37 years ago, there are offices now in New York, Paris and Berlin.

The Bridgeman provides a service for publishers and writers, and a half of what it earns goes back to the artists or museums, about £2m a year.

But now she and her team have taken on a new challenge on behalf of artists and collections. Three years ago the European Commission issued a directive that living artists would be entitled to “droite de suite” – a cut of any on sales of their work after the initial sale, less attractively known formally as Artist’s Resale Right – followed by UK legislation.