National Art Collections Fund
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| Founded | 1903 |
|---|---|
| Location |
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Area served
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United Kingdom |
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Members
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122,000 |
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Key people
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Stephen Deuchar CBE (director) Lord Smith of Finsbury (chairman) |
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Revenue
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£8,120,000 |
| Website | http://www.artfund.org |
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 William Morris Gallery - Museum of the Year 2013, (2:30), ArtFundUK |
Stephen Deuchar CBE (director)
Art Fund (formerly the National Art Collections Fund) is an independent membership-based British charity, which raises funds to aid the acquisition of artworks for the nation. It gives grants and acts as a channel for many gifts and bequests, as well as lobbying on behalf of museums and galleries and their users. It relies on members' subscriptions and public donations for funds and does not receive funding from the government or the National Lottery.
Since its foundation in 1903 Art Fund has been involved in the acquisition of over 860,000 works of art of every kind, including many of the most famous objects in British public collections, such as Velázquez's Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, Picasso's Weeping Woman in the Tate collection, the Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire Hoard in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the medieval Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant in the British Museum.
The original idea for an arts charity can be traced to a lecture given by John Ruskin in 1857 when he called for the establishment of a "great society" to save works of art for public collections and "watch over" them.
Art Fund, then named National Art Collections Fund, was founded in 1903 in order to help museums and galleries acquire works of art. The founders, who included Christiana Herringham, DS MacColl and Roger Fry, were prompted by what they saw as the inadequacy of government funding of museums.
Art critic Frank Rutter said it made him "boil with rage" that the Fund had spent thousands of pounds on Old Master paintings, some of which he considered of dubious merit or condition, but "would not contribute one half penny" to his appeal in 1905 to buy the first Impressionist painting for the National Gallery, although it welcomed the prestige of presenting the painting, Eugène Boudin's The Entrance to Trouville Harbour, the following year. He said "the Fund's inertia and snobbish ineptitude are entirely characteristic of the art-officialdom in England."
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Wikipedia