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.
