Enriching the V&A

By 1862, just adecade after its launch as a study collection for art and design, the Victoria and Albert Museum had become a reference resource for collectors, scholars andart-market experts.  Enriching theV&A, the final volume in a trilogy of books on the museum’s 19th-centuryhistory, describes how the young museum’s rapid growth in the followingdecades was driven more by collectors, agents and dealers, through loans,gifts and bequests, than by the combined expertise, acquisitions policies andbuying power of its directors and curators.The V&A soon became a collection ofcollections, embodying a new age of collecting that benefitted from thebreak-up of historic institutions and ancestral collections across Europe, and imperial expeditions in Asia and Africa. The industrialrevolution had created a new social class with the resources to buy from theexpanding art market, especially in the decorative arts. Many were touched bya new moral imperative to collect for the home, however humble, and to sharetheir specialist knowledge and enthusiasm by lending to the new publicmuseums.Enriching the V&A explores theformative influence on the museum, and on pioneering fields of scholarship,of the V&A’s leading Victorian and Edwardian benefactors. It also sharesuncomfortable truths about the sources of some objects from the age ofempires and shows how the meanings of things can change through thetransformation of private property into public museum collections.