Enriching The V&a (a Collection Of Collections (1862-1914))

By (author) Bryant, Julius
Description:
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.
Table of contents:
Foreword, Tristram Hunt; Part I: A Museum for Collectors?; Part II: Polymaths of the Graphic Arts; Part III: Collecting Overseas; Part IV: Collecting for New Museums; Part V: Collectors at Home; Part VI: Into the New Century; Notes; Acknowledgements; Further Reading; Index
Review quote:

''In his foreword, V&A director Tristram Hunt sees "collecting as a human impulse that everyone shares", and we can only imagine how future scholars will assess the collecting under way at the V&A now. Surely they will benefit from Julius Bryant’s landmark achievement.'' – Peter Trippi, Journal of the History of Collections

Biographical note:
Julius Bryant is Keeper Emeritus of the Victoria and Albert Museum. His previous books published by Lund Humphries and the V&A in this series are: Designing the V&A: The Museum as a Work of Art (1857–1909) (2017) and Creating the V&A: Victoria and Albert''s Museum (1851–1861) (2019).

Endorsement:
‘This is a work of great insight. It is both a magisterial examination of the creation of the greatest "collection of collections", and a profound meditation on the nature of collecting itself. It is beautiful and it is thought-provoking and I loved it.’  – Edmund de Waal