Collecting for the nation: the National Art Collections Fund and the gallery-visiting public in interwar Britain
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Egginton_H_Collecting_for_the_Nation_chapter_2025.pdf
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539.02 KB
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Adobe PDF
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Resource type
Book chapter
Creator (person)
Egginton, Heidi
Date published
August 7, 2025
Abstract
Among the cast of characters who sashay through the account of interwar connoisseurship in Peter Mandler's The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home are thousands of those who belonged to a 'stylish, go-ahead' organisation: members of the National Art Collections Fund (NACF, now Art Fund). Concentrated in the capital, but not as well-off as the Bright Young People and their fashionable interior decorators, less politicised than the modernist urban planners, yet also less enamoured with the rights of landowners than the aesthetes at Country Life, fascinated with the contents of country house collections but open to beauty in all its forms, the membership of the NACF was an important and vocal part of art's growing public before the Second World War. The democratisation of culture, in the form defined by Christopher Hilliard as 'a shared sense of entitlement to participate in cultural activities', encompassed artistic and material as well as literary practices. Recent scholarship knitting together social history, material culture and museum studies has started to restore the plurality of voices and opinions heard in Mandler's investigation into the audiences for country houses to the histories of other kinds of heritage collections, bringing attention to the private donors, voluntary associations and learning officers who played a creative role in interpreting as well as preserving the raw materials of history. By contrast, Britain's regional and national art galleries are often seen as reaching a nadir of underfunded fustiness during the interwar period, but shining new light on the infrastructure of public engagement with art collections can complicate our understanding of the processes by which 'ordinary' people participated in previously elite forms of self expression, tastemaking and cultural production. This chapter uses the little-studied interwar membership and publicity records of the NACF to examine how during this period connoisseurship was being remade for, and by, the 'democratic coalition' consisting of collectors, museum professionals, artists and art-loving members of the general public its founders had originally attempted to unite in the service of art collections.
Book title
Democratising History, Modern British History Inside and Out
Editor
Carter, Laura
Foks, Freddy
Harling, Philip
Pagination
121-140
Publisher
University of London Press
Place of publication
London
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Rights statement
In Copyright