Enriching the V&A: A Collection of Collections (1862-1914)

By 1862, just a

decade after its launch as a study collection for art and design, the Victoria and Albert Museum had become a reference resource for collectors, scholars and

art-market experts. Enriching the

V&A, the final volume in a trilogy of books on the museum’s 19th-century

history, describes how the young museum’s rapid growth in the following

decades was driven more by collectors, agents and dealers, through loans,

gifts and bequests, than by the combined expertise, acquisitions policies and

buying power of its directors and curators.

The V&A soon became a collection of

collections, embodying a new age of collecting that benefitted from the

break-up of historic institutions and ancestral collections across Europe, and imperial expeditions in Asia and Africa. The industrial

revolution had created a new social class with the resources to buy from the

expanding art market, especially in the decorative arts. Many were touched by

a new moral imperative to collect for the home, however humble, and to share

their specialist knowledge and enthusiasm by lending to the new public

museums.

Enriching the V&A explores the

formative influence on the museum, and on pioneering fields of scholarship,

of the V&A’s leading Victorian and Edwardian benefactors. It also shares

uncomfortable truths about the sources of some objects from the age of

empires and shows how the meanings of things can change through the

transformation of private property into public museum collections.