The Art Fund

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The Art Fund (originally known as The National Art Collections Fund) is an independent membership-based British charity, which raises funds to aid the acquisition of artworks for the nation.

The Art Fund assisted with the purchase of Velázquez's Rokeby Venus.

The Art Fund now has 80,000 members and apart from giving grants, acts as a channel for many gifts and bequests, as well as lobbying on behalf of museums and galleries and their users. The Fund relies on members' subscriptions and public donations for funds and does not receive funding from the government or the National Lottery. It has assisted in the acquisition of over 860,000 works of art of every kind from all over the world – including many of the most famous objects in British public collections, such Velázquez's Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, Picasso's Weeping Woman in Tate Modern, and the Iron Age Snettisham Hoard 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.

The Art Fund, then named The National Art Collections fund, was founded in 1903 in order to help museums and galleries acquire works of art. The founders of The Art Fund, who included Christiana Herringham, D. S. MacColl and Roger Fry, were prompted by what they saw as the inadequacy of government funding of museums.

Eugène Boudin. The Entrance to Trouville Harbour, 1888, presented to the National Gallery in 1906.

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 welcome the prestige of presenting the painting, Eugène Boudin's The Entrance to Trouville Harbour, the following year.[1] He said "the Fund's inertia and snobbish ineptitude are entirely characteristic of the art-officialdom in England."[1]

In 2005 the Fund was caught up in the controversy surrounding the purchase by the Tate gallery of The Upper Room by Chris Ofili.[2]

In 2006 it was caught out, when it was discovered that the Amarna Princess, purportedly an ancient Egyptian sculpture, was actually a forgery by Shaun Greenhalgh.

  1. ^ a b Rutter, Frank. Art in My Time, p.118–119, Rich & Cowan, London, 1933.
  2. ^ Hastings, Chris. "Tate Broke Own Rules on Ofili Buy", The Sunday Telegraph, 18 December 2005. Retrieved 10 October 2008.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_Fund"
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