Chinese porcelain, Old Master paintings, ancient Egyptian sculpture, Native American textiles, Islamic calligraphy and the latest contemporary work - these are just some of the 860,000 extraordinary artefacts from every corner of the globe acquired by museums and galleries all over the UK, with the help of the Art Fund. The total value of this support since 1903 is £51,735,279 (this is worth at least £100 million in today's money.)
Established in 1903, the Art Fund has an astonishing record of achievement. It has grown enormously over the past century and now has around 80,000 members, corporate members and trusts and foundations, who support our work through their subscriptions, donations and legacies.
The Art Fund believes that everyone should have the opportunity to experience great art at first hand, and has campaigned energetically on behalf of museums and galleries and their visitors from its earliest years.
We remain committed to working in a range of ways to raise the money that museums and galleries so badly need to help them build the public collections of the future.
The Art Fund Chronology
1903-1910
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- 1903 - The National Art Collections Fund is founded. By its first meeting it has 308 members and £700 in funds
- 1905 - Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Gold (Old Battersea Bridge) is presented to the National Gallery of British Art (now Tate) following the Art Fund's first public appeal
- 1906 - Velázquez's 'Rokeby Venus' is bought by the Art Fund following a public campaign and presented to the National Gallery. As a result, King Edward VII becomes the first royal patron of the charity
- 1909 - Holbein's Christina of Denmark is purchased by the Art Fund for £72,000 after a dramatic public appeal and presented to the National Gallery
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- 1911 - The Art Fund presents the 'Meroë Head' of Augustus to the British Museum
- 1913 - Auguste Rodin visits London to establish a location for his Burghers of Calais (which had been bought by the Art Fund), and attends the 10th AGM
- 1914 - With the outbreak of the First World War, museums and galleries in London close
- 1914 - 'The Rokeby Venus' is slashed by suffragist Mary Richardson in protest at the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst
- 1917 - The Art Fund receives its first legacy
- 1919 - Members of the Art Fund are admitted free to the National Gallery, Tate Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and Wallace Collection on paying days
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- 1922 - Membership is at 3,028, almost twice that of 1914
- 1924 - The Art Fund's 21st birthday - to celebrate, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald speaks at the AGM and Tintoretto's Portrait of Vincenzo Morosini is presented to the National Gallery to mark its centenary
- 1926 - The Art Fund puchases Michelangelo's Study for the Creation of Adam and presents it to the British Museum
- 1927 - Art Fund membership increases by 2,000 in the year, bringing total to 6,674
- 1929 - With the Art Fund's help, the Wilton Diptych and Titian's Vendramin Family are bought by the National Gallery, and the Luttrell Psalter is bought by the British Museum
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- 1930 - The first Art Fund advertisements appear in the London Underground with the slogan 'All Art Lovers Should Join'
- 1931 - The Great Bed of Ware is acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum through an appeal and with Art Fund help
- 1933 - The Art Fund begins to support the acquisition of African art
- 1935 - George Eumorfopoulos's collection of oriental art is acquired jointly by the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum with the assistance of the Art Fund
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- 1940 - The Archbishop of Canterbury speaks of 'the very special need for the work of the National Art Collections Fund during wartime.'
- 1940 - Government allocations for acquisitions cease and the Art Fund becomes one of the only sources of funding for museum purchases
- 1945 - The Art Fund assists the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery in Bournemouth to acquire Rossetti's Venus Verticordia
- 1946 - Most of the museums and galleries closed during the war are re-opened
- 1949 - The Manuk and Coles collection of Indian art is bequeathed through the Art Fund to four museums for them to make their own selections from 1,400 works, the remainder to be sold (raising over £5,000 for the Art Fund)
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- 1950 - H Burrows Abbey, Director of the Kemptown Breweries, Brighton, bequeaths 290 pieces of Chinese glass through the Art Fund - the largest collection outside China - to Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
- 1952 - The Art Fund helps the Victoria and Albert Museum acquire 15 pieces from the Kelekian collection of Islamic pottery
- 1953 - The Art Fund's 50th anniversary; Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, attends the AGM
- 1953 - Rodin's Kiss acquired by the Tate Gallery with the Art Fund's assistance
- 1955 - Ernest Edward Cook bequeaths over 150 pictures, plus furniture, silver and ceramics, the most important bequest ever left to the Art Fund
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- 1960 - The Art Fund helps the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, to buy Rubens' Virgin and Child with St Elizabeth and the Infant Baptist - the first municipal museum or art gallery to recive a government special purchase grant
- 1962 - The Art Fund organises a successful campaign to save Leonardo's Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist ('The Leonardo Cartoon'), raising £450,000. Nearly a million people come to see the Cartoon during the months when it is shown in the National Gallery
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- 1972 - The Girona Treasure (items recovered from the initial excavation of the Spanish galleas Girona, wrecked in 1588) bought by the Ulster Museum with the Art Fund's assistance
- 1972 - The Art Fund gives its largest grant to date, £100,000, to enable the National Gallery to buy Titian's Death of Actaeon
- 1975 - The National Portrait Gallery buys Julia Margaret Cameron's Herschel album, the first important photographic work acquired with an Art Fund grant
- 1977 - The Art Fund's Scottish Fund is launched to acquire works of art for Scottish galleries and museums
- 1978 - The Silchester collection of Roman antiquities is acquired for Reading Museum
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- 1980 - The National Heritage Memorial Fund is established
- 1985 - The Crucifixion, attributed to Duccio, is acquired by Manchester City Art Gallery after a public appeal launched by the Art Fund and with a grant of £500,000 (in celebration of the Art Fund's 80th birthday), the largest sum given to date
- 1986 - The Art Fund receives 33 legacies, a record number for a single year
- 1988 - Picasso's Weeping Woman is acquired for Tate with the assistance of the Art Fund
- 1989 - The Art Fund launches its Modern Art Fund with the exhibition Monet to Freud at Sotheby's, London
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- 1993 - National Heritage Lottery Fund established
- 1994 - The Art Fund moves into Millais House, South Kensington, its new freehold headquarters
- 1994 - The Art Fund contributes £500,000 to help the V&A and the National Gallery of Scotland jointly purchase Canova's Three Graces
- 1994 - Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych bought by the Tate Gallery, the first acquisition of a video work to have Art Fund support
- 1997 - The Art Fund launches a campaign to maintain free admission at all non-charging national museums and galleries
- 1999 - The Art Fund gives £550,000 - its largest grant to date - to the National Gallery of Scotland for Botticelli's Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child
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- 2000 - Brenda Knapp bequeathes a portfolio of shares and property worth over £5 million to the Art Fund
- 2001 - The Art Fund's VAT campaign is successful, enabling all national museums and galleries to introduce free admission
- 2003 - The Art Fund celebrates its centenary with a nationwide programme of events including an exhibition Saved! 100 years of the National Art Collections Fund at the Hayward Gallery, London
- 2003 - Titian's Venus Anadyomene acquired by the National Gallery of Scotland with an Art Fund grant of £500,000
- 2003 - The Art Fund helps secure the future of the Royal Photographic Society's collection of over 270,000 photographs, acquired for the NMPFT, Bradford
- 2004 - The Art Fund gives £400,000 towards Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks, secured by the National Gallery after a hard-fought campaign and a public appeal
- 2004 - The Art Fund launches a public appeal on BBC television's Culture Show to save the Macclesfield Psalter from export to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles
- 2005 - Following a successful fundraising appeal, and a pledge of £500,000 from the Art Fund, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, successfully acquires the Macclesfield Psalter with additional help from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Friends of the Fitzwilliam, and £180,000 in donations
- 2005 - Sir Joshua Reynolds's double portrait Colonel Acland and Lord Sydney: The Archers is saved from export by Tate with the help of a grant of £400,000 from the Art Fund
- 2006 - The Art Fund unveils its first major commission - a permanent installation at Yorkshire Sculpture Park by renowned American artist James Turrell, entitled The Deer Shelter
- 2007 - Successful campaigns to save The Blue Rigi by Turner and Dumfries House
- 2008 - The Art Fund Prize awarded to the Lightbox museum and gallery in Woking. The Art Fund gives £600,000 to Tate's campaign to save Rubens's Banqueting House sketch. The Art Fund gives an exceptional grant of £1 million towards the acquisition of ARTIST ROOMS, Anthony D'Offay's collection of international modern and contemporary works.
- 2008 - 2009 - Regional tours of ARTIST ROOMS sponsored by the Art Fund begin.
- 2010 - Successfully campaigns to save the £3.3 Staffordshire Hoard for Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent. Antony Gormley's 6 Times is unveiled in Edinburgh thanks to a £150,000 Art Fund grant. The Ulster Museum wins the £100,000 Art Fund Prize.
- 2011 - British Museum crowned 'Museum of the Year' and wins the Art Fund Prize 2011 for A History of the World. Launches campaign to help buy Nelson's Ship in a Bottle by Yinka Shonibare, MBE for the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
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