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The National Art Collections Fund celebrates 100 years of rescuing art for Britain. By Polly Chiapetta

C O L L E C T I O N S

happenings SAVED!

A charity that devotes its efforts to saving art for the nation celebrates100 years this year.The National Art Collections Fund, or NACF asit is normally known, helps to secure works of art that wouldotherwise be sold abroad, and is associated with some of the mostimportant objects still (thanks to it) in British collections:Velázquez’sRokeby Venus, Holbein’s Queen Christina of Denmark, both in theNational Gallery, and Picasso’s Weeping Woman in the Tate are amongthe best known. Now the achievements of the NACF are beingcelebrated in a new exhibition at the refurbished Hayward Galleryin London. It features a selection from the 500,000 works of art thatthe NACF has been involved in supporting over the years.

The original founders of the charity were individuals passionateabout art and concerned at the speed at which important works werebeing sold abroad for prices that British galleries could not hope tomatch.The critic Roger Fry, the heiress Christiana, Lady Herringham,a critic and later keeper of the Tate Gallery, D.S. MacColl, and thelawyer and connoisseur Claude Phillips, made up the original group;they set the annual membership fee at a guinea.Within a year therewere 300 members and the Fund stood at £700.Artists rallied to thecause in its early days, among them Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema andJohn Singer Sargent as well as connoisseurs such as Sir Robert Wittand scholars including Sidney Colvin.

In the 50 years preceding the Fund’s foundation, the effects of theagricultural crisis and a discouraging tax system in Britain were suchthat owners – usually landed families struggling to maintain housesand estates – sold art to raise funds.With the National Gallery’s ownpurchase fund standing at a miserable £10,000, it was left toindividuals and museums abroad to reap the spoils. By the end of thecentury, the number of works formerly in British collections that hadbeen bought by German galleries had reached 30.

From its earliest days, the Fund was even-handed in the types ofworks it was involved in acquiring: in its early years these includedan Iznik ware pot for the Victoria and Albert museum as well as acontroversial modern work: James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s paintingNocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge, which went to the Tate.This catholicity has continued to the present day,when there is equally

Clockwise from above: Judith with theHead of Holofernes by Lucas Cranach,1530; Turning the World Inside Out byAnish Kapoor, 1996; The Forest Fireby Piero de Cosimo, 1490; Cameojewel from the Girona Treasure,Anonymous Spanish, 16th century

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