National Art Collections Fund

National Art Collections Fund.
The UK's largest art charity, established in 1903 to assist public collections to acquire works of art they would not otherwise be able to afford. The founders, who included Roger Fry and D. S. MacColl, shared a concern about the amount of art leaving the country, and the Fund's first conspicuous achievement came in 1906 when, by means of a public appeal, it bought Velázquez's Rokeby Venus, which was in danger of being sold abroad, and presented it to the National Gallery, London (the painting cost £45,000 and at this time the Gallery's annual purchase grant was £5,000). Many similar successes have followed, most memorably that with Leonardo da Vinci's cartoon of the Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist: in 1962 financial problems forced the Royal Academy to sell the cartoon, its greatest treasure, and the Fund's campaign to secure it for the National Gallery caught the public imagination to such an extent that an estimated 300,000 people made contributions to the purchase price of £800,000 (see also Wheeler). Most of the Fund's work deals with more modest art, however, and by the time of its centenary in 2003 it had helped more than 600 museums, galleries, and historic houses throughout the UK to make more than 400,000 acquisitions, ranging from prehistoric artefacts to contemporary experimental pieces. More broadly, the Fund aims to increase public enjoyment and understanding of art and has, for example, played a leading role in the campaign to abolish admission charges to national museums—an object that was achieved in 2001. The Fund is an independent charity, without government aid, and is supported mainly by members' subscriptions, bequests, and donations.

In 1910 the Contemporary Art Society was founded as a specialist counterpart in the field of modern art, acquiring works by living artists for gift or loan to public collections in Britain (and later in the Commonwealth and occasionally elsewhere). In 1991 it published a book celebrating its 80th anniversary and by this time had presented more than 4,000 works, mainly by British artists.