ENRICHING THE V&A: A COLLECTION OF COLLECTIONS (1862–1914)

Told in six parts, the story begins with the Museum, how it defined its mission and how to achieve it. The first important gift, from John Sheepshanks in 1857, was a collection of paintings reflecting scenes from literature and the theatre. The Dickens circle added pictures, Old Master drawings, manuscripts, miniatures and the Charles Dickens papers. 

With Parts III and V we reach decorative arts through ceramics collector Lady Charlotte Schreiber. Her journals portray markets and curiosity dealers, with a network of agents and collectors across Europe, Africa and Asia and reveal that the Victorians were not unaware of the issues raised by spoliation.

In 1882, military clothier John Jones’ collection filled an important lack, the 18th-century arts of France. That period, particularly rococo, was out of fashion. In 1901 came Constantine Alexander Ionides’ collection, showing the shift to the cosmopolitan Aesthetic tendency. George Salting added masterpieces to areas of the Museum’s greatest strengths.

Sir George Donaldson’s major gift of Art Nouveau metalwork, pottery, glass and furniture was to prove as divisive as rococo. The gift met with a hostile reception owing to its modernity. It was sent off to Bethnal Green and not recovered and valued until Elizabeth Aslin’s intervention, related by her in ‘Sir George Donaldson and Art Nouveau at South Kensington’, for DAS Journal 7, 1983.

The museum’s rapid subsequent growth was in the hands of a succession of directors, who faced reluctance to spend on the Government’s part and competing claims of the British Museum. Despite the early absence of significant loans in the applied arts, acquisitions were being made. Bryant cites ‘The Making of the South Kensington Museum’, Clive Wainwright’s posthumously published study for the complex purchasing operation. Like Wainwright, Bryant is interested in the personalities and their motivation. The two read together present a detailed account of the formation of the Museum.

ENRICHING THE V&A: A COLLECTION OF COLLECTIONS (1862–1914)

Julius Bryant, Lund Humphries in association with V&A Publishing, 2022, hb £35

Condensed from a review by Charlotte Gere in DAS Newsletter No. 130