Lesley Lewis was one of the first four students to be accepted as an undergraduate to study the history of art at the Courtauld Institute when it opened in 1932. She retained a lifelong interest in the subject.
There are more than 100 Art Funded works in the V&A collections, including paintings by Constable, Turner and Gainsborough, ceramics by Edmund de Waal and tapestries by William Morris.
Immediately recognisable in image and reproduction, Antonio Canova's neoclassical marble sculpture of Zeus's daughters, The Three Graces, was nearly lost from the UK when it was acquired by the Getty Museum in 1994. The Art Fund was able to help secure it, and it is now shared between the V&A and the National Galleries of Scotland.
In 2015, Art Fund supported the acquisition of The Wolsey Angels, originally commissioned by Henry VIII's chief advisor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, to adorn his tomb. After he fell out of favour with the monarch, Wolsey's belongings were appropriated by Henry and the statues disappeared into the unknown. Following separate rediscoveries of two pairs of the angels in 1994 and 2008, they are now reunited in the V&A collection.
