Art Fund, the UK’s national charity for art, is this week celebrating 120 years of funding art and championing museums. The charity was established on 11th November 1903 to support museums and galleries to acquire great art for public collections, for the enjoyment of everyone. Today it works with a network of 850 museums, galleries and historic houses across the UK, helping them to acquire and share works of art, connect with their communities and inspire the next generation.
For 120 years the Art Fund has been a vital force for good in the cultural ecology. Benefitting everyone who loves art and material culture; museums, visitors and artists. I have always been proud to support this great organisation in any way I can.
Artist Grayson Perry
To mark the anniversary, Art Fund has launched a fundraising campaign to support initiatives that bring more people into museums and connect museums more deeply with their local communities. The charity is raising funds to allow it to spend £1.2million in 2024/5 towards these activities, alongside its annual activity providing millions in grants and support.
The next year will also see the charity offering further support for commissions, bringing great art into public spaces, and building on the success of recent project The Wild Escape to run further initiatives designed to bring young audiences into museums.
I am an enormous fan of the Art Fund. Their National Art Pass helps to connect more and more people with art and history, from David Hockney to dinosaurs. Last year I was lucky enough to be one of the judges for their Museum of the Year Prize, and I saw at first-hand how the Art Fund is backing the best in UK museums and galleries. It’s 120 great years.
Historian Mary Beard
Art Fund is an independent membership organisation, powered by people. Since its founding, membership has grown from 500 to a thriving community of over 135,000 National Art Pass members across a range of membership types – including Art Passes for students, teachers and under-30s, as well as options for those with accompanying friends or children. It is thanks to these members that buy a National Art Pass, as well as the support of trusts, foundations and donors, that Art Fund’s charitable work is made possible.
The support of individuals enables the charity to raise millions of pounds each year to fund art, helping the UK’s museums to enrich their collections; to build audiences, with the National Art Pass opening doors to great culture for everyone; and to champion museums, through the annual Museum of the Year award – the world’s largest museums prize – and creative events that bring the UK’s museums together.
In its 120-year history, Art Fund has worked to connect museums and people with great art and culture, including helping to bring hundreds of thousands of objects and works of art into public collections. For a full list, visit www.artfund.org/our-purpose/our-story.
Highlights include:
1903: The National Art Collections Fund is founded by a group of artists and patrons, including Christiana Herringham, DS MacColl and Roger Fry – prompted by the government’s inadequate museum funding.
1906: Art Fund is established as an organisation by Royal Charter as King Edward VII becomes Art Fund’s royal patron, and Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus is purchased by Art Fund. Following a public campaign, Art Fund purchases this highly influential work and presents it to the National Gallery, London.
1919: Art Fund members are granted free admission to galleries. Art Fund’s members are admitted free entry to the National Gallery, Tate Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and Wallace Collection in thanks for their support.
1953: HRH The Queen becomes Art Fund royal patron, and Tate acquires Rodin’s The Kiss. This important marble sculpture, made in 1901-4, joins the Tate’s collection of modern art with Art Fund support.
1972: The Ulster Museum, Belfast, acquires the Girona Treasure. Items recovered from the initial excavation of the Spanish Armada ship La Girona, wrecked in 1588, join the Ulster Museum’s collection with Art Fund support.
1975: Art Fund supports the acquisition of photographic work for the first time. The Herschel album by pioneering 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron joins the National Portrait Gallery collection with Art Fund support.
1999: The National Gallery of Scotland acquires Botticelli’s Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child. Art Fund gives £550,000 to help Scotland’s National Gallery acquire this Botticelli masterpiece, created around 1485.
2012: The National Maritime Museum, London, acquires Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle by Yinka Shonibare. This contemporary gem, a sculpture commissioned for the Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square and unveiled in 2010, is acquired by the National Maritime Museum following a successful Art Fund fundraising campaign.
2013: The William Morris Gallery, London, wins the first Art Fund Museum of the Year, formerly known as The Art Fund Prize. The museum is announced as the winner of the world’s largest museum prize for its major £5m renovation and its creative reinterpretation of Morris’s life and work.
2014: The Wedgwood Collection is saved following the fastest fundraising campaign in Art Fund’s history. The 31-day campaign raised £15.75m to ensure the Wedgwood Collection was not broken up and disbanded, through a gift to the V&A which allowed the Collection to remain on display in Barlaston, Stoke.
2018: The National Gallery acquires a rare self-portrait, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Artemisia Gentileschi, the most celebrated female artist of the Italian Baroque, with support from Art Fund
2020: The future of Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage is secured. Art Fund’s major appeal to save artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage for the nation reaches its £3.5m target. Creative Folkestone now take care of the iconic home, the interior of which is made available to the public for the first time. They also run an eclectic residency programme at the site.
2021: Art Fund supports Hackney Windrush Art Commissions. Veronica Ryan’s Custard Apple (Annonaceae), Breadfruit (Moraceae) and Soursop (Annonaceae) – the first permanent public sculpture by a black female artist in the UK – is unveiled in Hackney. And in 2022 Thomas J Price’s sculpture, Warm Shores, is unveiled outside Hackney Town Hall as a permanent reminder of the borough’s connection to the Windrush generation.
2023: Art Fund gives the latest grant in its history, £2.5m, to help save Joshua Reynolds’ Mai (Omai) from private ownership in a landmark joint acquisition between the National Portrait Gallery and the Getty, LA. The Wild Escape is launched. With the participation of hundreds of museums and thousands of children, this major project celebrates UK wildlife and brings young audiences to UK museums.
