The rise of the small collector

Aiming for broad appeal while speaking to the aesthetically discerning proved a difficult tightrope for the NACF and its members to walk, but the persona of the private collector proved to be a key point of connection between the organisation and the public. By the 1920s, making collections of antiques, curios and inexpensive works of art had become a popular middle-class hobby.²² ‘Small collectors’ made up an important segment of the market for home furnishings and art and interior design journals, and long before the rise of eBay and the Antiques Roadshow there was a recognition among popular retailers and journalists of the cultural importance of the specific practices connected with viewing and purchasing works of art, including those of recent vintage.²³ Commercial art galleries in London pivoted to cater to an influx of women collectors: young, educated, increasingly financially independent and on the hunt for handcrafted objects and reproductions with which to decorate small flats.²⁴ Collectors of all kinds claimed a special authority as both consumers and exhibition visitors. The two-penny collectors’ weekly Bazaar, Exchange & Mart could announce in 1928 that the V&A had become ‘a training ground for connoisseurs’, and in the next sentence: ‘[n]o wonder then that it is said to attract more people every year than any other museum in the country’ – statements which do not follow logically, as the V&A’s historian points out, until seen in the context of a growing public appetite for art appreciation which extended beyond the gallery into the bric-à-brac shop, market stall and home.²⁵ The NACF helped to bring these conceptions of small-scale, domestic collecting to the conversation on support for the arts, and in so doing laid important groundwork for later developments in arts funding and access to collections by complicating the picture of a public in need of art instruction.

Amid soaring picture prices, special appeals to save Old Masters from the clutches of American millionaires may have given the NACF its overriding impetus and dominated the public’s impression of the organisation’s activities, but its administrators and supporters in the art press were keen to stress that its day-to-day mission covered art of all periods and places. Based after 1918 in offices at the Wallace Collection at Hertford House, the archetypal opulent nineteenth-century private collector’s museum, the NACF saw part of its role during the interwar period as a nationwide ‘clearing house’ and intelligence network mediating between collectors large and small – for whom it offered an opportunity to dispose of works of art without incurring additional taxes – and the acquisition priorities of local and regional museums.²⁶ Its publicity often drew attention to successes in placing prestigious works of art with local or regional connections into the relevant repository – for instance, pictures by Constable for Ipswich and Joseph Wright of Derby for Derby, or the last letter of Mary, Queen of Scots as part of the campaign to establish the National Library of Scotland. Olivia Baskerville and Laura Cleaver’s study of the 1920 appeal to save a twelfth-century manuscript of the ‘Life of St Cuthbert’, made in the north-east of England, for the British Museum notes the way in which the NACF attempted (albeit with only partial success) to tap into local networks of its members for small monetary donations towards campaigns spearheaded by metropolitan professionals.²⁷ Less well recognised has been the NACF’s role in channelling lower-profile gifts and bequests to museums and galleries informed by ‘lists’ from local curators, on whose behalf it would also sometimes bid at auction in this period.²⁸

The acquisitions the interwar NACF made on behalf of the nation ranged from masterpieces to the ‘minor arts’ in all periods, including prints and drawings, miniatures, sculpture, ceramics, coins, metalwork, textiles and costume, jewellery, furniture and period rooms, literary and illuminated manuscripts, scientific instruments, archaeological finds and ethnographic collections. Living artists were represented, and in 1932 one anonymous donor gave £200 to the National Portrait Gallery for new commissions. The NACF occasionally acquired the work of younger artists, as in 1934 when it helped to purchase a sculpture of a swift by the twenty-one-year-old studio potter Walter Vivian Cole for Leicester Museum and Art Gallery via the design reformer Harry Peach. Parallel fundraising campaigns by the Contemporary Art Society and regional museum friends’ organisations across Britain and the Commonwealth were also supported in this period.²⁹ While it necessarily had to be selective in the acquisitions it supported, its eclectic, decentralised approach meant that the NACF was seen to act by and for artists and collectors. Speaking in 1937, the politician Malcolm MacDonald confessed, alluding to his own penchant for collecting ceramics: ‘I for one am so grateful that the [NACF] does not forget the importance of good teapots, cream jugs and cups and saucers’.³⁰

‘The ambassador of the public’: Sir Robert Witt

The NACF had a natural champion of the ‘small collector’ in the form of its chairman from 1920 to 1945 and co-founder, Sir Robert Witt. A solicitor who had begun collecting photographs and reproductions of artworks in partnership with his future wife, Mary Helene Marten, while both were undergraduates at Oxford, Witt was among the early generation of arts professionals who represented a thorn in the side of the traditional culture of aristocratic trusteeship.³¹ In later life, Kenneth Clark remembered him as an effective, if ‘forceful’ administrator. On Clark’s first day as Director of the National Gallery in January 1934, his ‘first visitor’ was ‘Sir Robert Witt, who came to tell me that anything I did must be attributed to the [NACF]’ (quickly followed by the Director of the V&A, who came to tell Clark ‘that, whatever I did, I must never have anything to do’ with them).³² Witt was involved in establishing the Courtauld Institute of Art, the first higher education institution dedicated to the training of art historians in Britain, during the early 1930s, but he had long held an interest in ministering to a broader art-loving public. In 1902 he had published his first illustrated primer on approaching fine art, How to Look at Pictures, which addressed itself not to ‘the artist, the expert or the professional critic’, but to those who ‘long to feel at home in a collection of pictures, instead of lost in a strange world and out of touch with its inhabitants’.³³ He went on to play a prominent role in organising a series of loan exhibitions of European art at Burlington House in the late 1920s and early 1930s which broke new ground as large-scale, performative ‘blockbuster’ art shows.³⁴ A vote of thanks for speeches by Witt and by Sir William Llewellyn, the president of the Royal Academy, at the NACF’s 1928 annual general meeting declared that, if Llewellyn was the ‘ambassador of art’, Witt was ‘the ambassador of the public’.³⁵ The Witt Library of over 750,000 reproductions and Old Master drawings would be bequeathed to the Courtauld, but until his death Witt and his wife continued to open the collection as a free resource at their London home, 32 Portman Square, a fact often advertised in newspaper coverage of the NACF and exploited by its members.³⁶

Witt’s advocacy on behalf of the NACF built a case for improved financial support of the arts based on their importance in everyday life. His route for the NACF to ‘become more fully “national”’, as he had proposed on the eve of accepting the chairmanship, was to attract support ‘not only, as at present, by those specially interested as artists, connoisseurs, collectors, and critics, but by every art lover in the land’.³⁷ This audience, he maintained, was already fully formed, rather than in need of coaxing into action. Witt’s stance extended the shift, identified by Giles Waterfield among regional museums in this period, from a liberal ethos of civic improvement towards a ‘new egalitarianism’ and the support of ‘non-vocational enjoyment of art for the public at large’.³⁸ In his 1911 pamphlet The Nation’s Art Treasures, which helped prompt the setting up of the Curzon Committee of enquiry into the sale of paintings to collectors overseas, Witt had argued it was ‘public opinion’, spanning the ‘universities’ to the market for ‘the reproductions that fill the shop windows’, that was putting pressure on the state to stop neglecting art as ‘the illegitimate child of Education’.³⁹

The idea of finding a remedy appeals to-day to the patriotism and sentiment of thousands to whom the idea of part-ownership in the great national collections has lately come with all the combined force of truth and novelty. The realisation by the public that the National Gallery is their National Gallery, as they ascend the steps and thrill at the sight of some new masterpiece added to the collection, is a very real and powerful influence at work.⁴⁰

Witt typically quoted from members’ letters on this theme in his speeches; indeed, NACF record-keeping practices under his chairmanship mean that letters received from members of the public on specific topics were retained and filed alongside those from NACF committee members and other art world professionals.⁴¹

In Witt’s view, those who felt a sense of personal ‘part-ownership’ of the contents of public collections needed no particular qualification to appreciate art, but they did require support in the form of well-run museums. In 1920, anticipating the damning report on the health of public museums submitted to the Carnegie Trust in 1928 by Sir Henry Miers, Witt added a chapter to the third edition of How to Look at Pictures focusing on the importance of what he called the ‘machinery of showing’ art in galleries, which included good lighting, combining paintings with works of art and furniture ‘of the same school and period’, and offering inexpensive catalogues and postcards.⁴² He used his platform at the NACF’s annual meetings to address the slow progress made in implementing the recommendations of the Royal Commission on National Museums and Galleries (1927–30), endorsing the need for improvements to additional visitor services in the form of free admission, rest and refreshment areas, circulating exhibitions, extended opening hours and ‘liaison officers at each Museum specially appointed to promote closer contact with the public’.⁴³ But it was the encounter with the work of art itself which formed the direct link between the British people and their institutions. ‘The connexion between the museums and the public is in reality a most intimate one’, Witt suggested in a letter to The Times acknowledging the success of the NACF’s 1920 appeal to purchase Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Adoration of the Kings for the National Gallery, ‘for the objects we most admire in them will often represent just those very things with which we try to surround ourselves in our homes and in our lives’.⁴⁴ For Witt, ‘a visit to a museum ought to make any visitor go away not merely thinking that he has seen a number of interesting things, but wanting … to feel that they are an essential part of his everyday life’.⁴⁵

These themes were developed in Witt’s BBC radio talks in 1927 and 1937, which took the form of discussions on the NACF’s aims and achievements to solicit new subscribing members rather than direct appeals for financial aid.⁴⁶ In his first talk, Witt expanded on a metaphor he had used in earlier speeches and writings to portray American collectors’ insatiable desire for the art in British galleries as on a continuum with the ‘craving’ for ‘all that is rare and beautiful’ felt by ordinary people: ‘The layman must have [works of art] to satisfy his hunger for beauty, a hunger felt consciously or unconsciously by every man, woman, and child’.⁴⁷ For this reason anyone could become a ‘private collector’ in order to ‘express the artist that lies in each one of us’, he would go on to argue at the NACF’s annual meeting in 1935: ‘I know a typist who collects old master drawings, a policeman who picks up etchings, a clerk who specialises in textiles—be they only little scraps of old brocades or silks’.⁴⁸ Witt’s October 1937 talk, ‘Collecting for a Nation’, declared that this capacity for recognising beauty among the British public would usher in a new era of selflessness in art appreciation. On the advice of the BBC editor, the talk was framed by Witt’s line ‘Everyone is—or should be—a collector of something’.⁴⁹ Donating to the NACF was directly compared to collecting stamps or buying souvenirs for the home. The difference was that helping to raise funds to collect works of art for public galleries not only increased one’s own enjoyment of art, it increased ‘the enjoyment of the whole Nation’.⁵⁰

‘Collecting for a Nation’ prompted a flurry of correspondence with listeners, most of whom are identified in annotation as ‘non-members’. Most wrote in to the NACF with descriptions of works of art or antiques in their own personal collections to ask for advice on where to place them in public museums. The objects offered included an engraving, a set of old Dutch tiles, a carved ivory fan, a ‘very large lamp’ from China, several portraits, a ‘Mahogany bookcase, over 250 years old’, and a ‘Moorish mirror, which I have twice been told is a museum piece’. A couple from Bournemouth, who had ‘listened with great interest’ to the talk, wrote to Witt to describe their ‘gold enamelled Fob Seal (musical) which formerly belonged to George Frederic Handel’. A widow from Harrow who felt she had been taken advantage of by local dealers in the past admitted that her three pictures ‘may not be of interest to the Nation’ but asked for Witt to guide her towards a more ‘genuine’ opinion. Only one correspondent, who described himself as a ‘working man’ who had been ‘unemployed for a considerable time’, and who was seeking to sell a painting he had placed on loan in his local art gallery through the NACF, expressed any doubt as to whether he had written to the right place. Indeed, each of the letters which survives in the archive received a personalised response with guidance and suggestions. A radiologist from Chingford who had asked where to offer his ‘early Victorian sideboard’ was pointed in the direction of the Geffrye Museum, for instance.⁵¹ These listeners may have misinterpreted the NACF’s appeal for new members, but they evidently understood Witt’s appeal to the small collector.

‘All Art-Lovers Should Join’

Outside of its chairman’s advocacy, the NACF relied to a significant extent on word of mouth to raise awareness of the organisation and its activities. While it expected its name to be included in wall labels for the works of art it helped place in public collections, only limited funds were made available for formal advertising. This included placing reproductions of paintings saved in high-profile appeals on the London Underground, and a poster and magazine campaign with the slogan ‘All Art-Lovers Should Join’.⁵² The NACF also attracted offers from public relations professionals keen to work with it during the 1930s.⁵³ However, Witt noted that, in comparison to the full-time publicity staff employed by American museum friends associations, the NACF’s best ‘recruiting sergeants’ were its members.⁵⁴ A list containing every member’s name was published in the NACF’s annual report, with additional lists of those who offered to pay more than the one-guinea minimum subscription fee and those who had made contributions to special appeals. Benefits were conferred on individuals, so subscribing was often a family affair. Circulars asked subscribers to bring NACF events and appeals to the notice of their friends, and forms were provided to collect the details of prospective members, to whom a copy of Witt’s pamphlet on the ‘Aims and Achievements’ of the NACF was posted.⁵⁵ Copies of the NACF annual report were also sent out speculatively to be ‘laid on the Library table’ of London clubs, but a more vigorous correspondence was maintained throughout this period regarding the design and placement of NACF collection boxes in prominent positions within the London galleries, highlighting the importance of casual monetary donations from museum-goers.⁵⁶

NACF administrators did actively cultivate relationships with editors in the collecting press, illustrating how closely the organisation relied on this growing constituency of art consumers for support. Requests from journalists to ‘circularize’ the NACF’s membership list were always refused, but as a token gesture to Bazaar, Exchange & Mart, who had written in 1927 to explore ways of making their weekly for collectors and connoisseurs more well known to NACF subscribers, the Secretary displayed copies of the magazine in the front hall of the Wallace Collection.⁵⁷ Approaches were received from other new periodicals founded during the collecting boom of the late 1920s: Old Furniture, who wanted to bring their articles on ‘artistic handicrafts’ to the notice of the NACF’s ‘lovers of art’, and The Amateur Artist and Collector, whose own subscribers, the editor promised, were ‘of a class well able to subscribe to’ the NACF.⁵⁸ Conversely, the NACF prepared photographs of its latest acquisitions, digests of its annual reports, and advertisements for periodicals including the Burlington Magazine, The Artist, The Antique Collector and the Bazaar, often noting the increase in membership as a result.⁵⁹

Reaching out beyond a metropolitan audience of art lovers became a significant concern during the late 1920s, the period in which the NACF was experiencing the biggest jump in annual subscriptions. The organisation maintained a network of ‘Local Representatives’, who were tasked with distributing campaign literature and coordinating talks and events. Coverage was patchy and dependent on the interests of volunteers: during the interwar period, there were at most two representatives covering the whole of Scotland, both based in Edinburgh, and none in Wales. A set of notes in the NACF archive records an attempt to analyse the geographic spread of the membership in 1929, when only 1,244 of over 12,000 subscribers had addresses outside of London. The largest concentrations were those in the Home Counties and East Anglia, followed by Yorkshire and Lancashire.⁶⁰ These figures were circulated in an effort to address the regional disparities, and in late 1929 the NACF received a variety of letters from non-metropolitan members with suggestions for driving up subscriptions. These included the names and addresses of friends or notable collectors in their county, as well as the published membership lists of other societies linked to art or collecting, such as the Cambridge Drawing Society, the Winchester Art Club and the Blackburn Antiquarian Society.⁶¹ During the 1930s, the NACF also fielded requests from local curators hoping to borrow its acquisitions for their galleries: one, in search of a Jacob Epstein or other examples of modern sculpture for Hereford, maintained ‘[t]here are hundreds of people in this city … who have never seen a fine work of art except the exterior of the cathedral’.⁶²

One of the main drivers for art lovers to join the NACF during the interwar period was acknowledged to be the assortment of member privileges, or ‘treats’, offered to those who paid the one-guinea annual subscription fee. Membership cards entitled the holder to free entry on paying days to London’s major art galleries and the Ashmolean, as well as admission to the libraries and print study rooms at the British Museum and V&A. A regular events programme invited subscribers to exhibition openings, after-hours soirées at London museums, lectures on art history and visits to private collections never usually accessible to the public. It was estimated that visits to exhibitions at the Royal Academy between 1927 and 1930 each attracted between 2,000 and 3,500 members over two nights, while owners of large country houses outside of London were asked to expect up to 1,000 guests a day.⁶³ Visits included opportunities to see artworks and interiors in situ before pieces were sold or sites demolished, as at Norfolk House, Westminster, in January 1938, where objects from the collection of the Dukes of Norfolk were being prepared for auction at Christie’s. This strand of the NACF’s activities served as an important form of publicity in its own right, often attracting press interest and boosting subscription figures: the chance to see the 1930 Exhibition of Italian Art the day before the official private view was reported to have generated nearly 1,000 new members in the previous month.⁶⁴ The NACF actively responded to members’ suggestions for visits, especially those they could combine with recruitment drives outside of London.⁶⁵

Given free rein by generous owners of private collections, the NACF was able to make interventions on behalf of its members. Witt personally ensured that visits to private collections, for which members were provided with discounted rail or coach tickets, were led by owners or other knowledgeable guides, and in several cases paid additional visits to the collections to rewrite their catalogues in summary format organised by room, rather than by style or period, so members could ‘go round the house with a copy’ and ‘know what they are looking at’.⁶⁶ Visits generated a vigorous correspondence with members, whether comments on how ‘their’ purchases were being displayed and the behaviours of other exhibition visitors, or with gratitude for the provision of supplementary lectures and guidebooks. In March 1935 members were invited to a soirée to celebrate the installation of electric lighting at the National Gallery: an improvement Witt had long been urging the Office of Works to make as a ‘public service’. ‘I hope’, he wrote to Kenneth Clark after the event, ‘some of the voces populi reached you as to the colour of the walls and the arrangement of the pictures’.⁶⁷

Conclusion

This chapter has taken a perspective on the history of collecting ‘from below’ by examining one of the organisations which did most to communicate the value of the pursuit to new audiences in Britain during the interwar period. If it did not directly enfranchise its supporters, the NACF nonetheless acted as a key interface between the art world and members of the general public. Indeed, key to its glittering success during the interwar period was the growing popular culture of art appreciation and consumption which both sustained and helped shape the direction of its campaigns. That the NACF’s dramatic expansion after the First World War harnessed a connection between the acquisition of works of art, broadly defined, for members’ own homes and contributions to the welfare of Britain’s public institutions is suggestive of a more complex relationship with art patronage among non-elite art lovers and museum-goers than has previously been recognised. As Country Life put it in 1934, ‘through such organisations as the [NACF], it is open to everybody to have a share in a collection of works of art far greater than any monarch’s cabinet’.⁶⁸ Uncovering the influence of small collectors on the work of the NACF, which was both drawing on languages of collective ownership and mediating the entry of non-elite visitors into spaces for the reproduction of cultural hierarchies and canon formation, can challenge conventional narratives of progress in the widening of public access to Britain’s art collections during the mid-twentieth century. The evident importance of appealing to art-loving consumers across different aspects of the NACF’s activities – from its ‘treats’ and publicity to the actual business of fundraising – demonstrates how, before the Second World War, the popular private investment in collecting could be harnessed for the purposes of improving public access to art and cementing its status as a social good.

Notes

1. 1.  The research for this chapter was made possible by a Research Support Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2017–18. I am grateful to Art Fund for permission to access and quote from its archive.

2. 2.  P. Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 238–9, 265–308.

3. 3.  C. Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratisation of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 5–8.

4. 4.  K. Hill, Women and Museums, 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); L. Carter, Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918–1979 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 128–61. For an earlier period, see also T. Stammers, ‘Elite and Popular Connoisseurship at the Louvre, c.1848–1870’, in C. M. Anderson and P. Stewart (eds.), Connoisseurship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 95–131.

5. 5.  B. Taylor, Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public, 1747–2001 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 132, 155–66; G. Waterfield, The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain, 1800–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 2–4, 319–21; G. Crossick, ‘Museums, Audiences and Collections: Thinking About Historical Context’, Cultural Trends, 27 (2018), pp. 232–8.

6. 6.  M. Lago, Christiana Herringham and the Edwardian Art Scene (London: Lund Humphries, 1996), pp. 80–81.

7. 7.  H. Rees, ‘Art Exports and the Construction of National Heritage in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, in C. D. Goodwin and N. De Marchi (eds.), Economic Engagements with Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 187–208; P. Mandler, ‘Art, Death and Taxes: The Taxation of Works of Art in Britain, 1796–1914’, Historical Research, 74 (2001), pp. 271–97; J. Stourton, Heritage: A History of How We Conserve Our Past (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), pp. 95–113.

8. 8.  P. Fletcher and A. Helmreich (eds.), The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); B. Pezzini, ‘(Inter)national Art: The London Old Masters Market and Modern British Painting (1900–14)’, in J. D. Baetens and D. Lyna (eds.), Art Crossing Borders: The Internationalisation of the Art Market in the Age of Nation States, 1750–1914 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 127–63.

9. 9.  On the establishment of the NACF, see M. Lago, Christiana Herringham, pp. 57–121; J. Gardiner, ‘Rebels and Connoisseurs’, in M. Bailey and R. Verdi (eds.), Saved! 100 Years of the National Art Collections Fund (London: Scala, 2003), pp. 16–25; A. Geddes Poole, Stewards of the Nation’s Art: Contested Cultural Authority 1890–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 101–29. Friends’ organisations were not unheard of in Britain: Birmingham had its own ‘Public Picture Gallery Fund’ with a purchase committee enjoying an endowment of £17,000 by 1881; see Waterfield, The People’s Galleries, p. 206.

10. 10.  Mandler, Fall and Rise, p. 269.

11. 11.  D. S. MacColl, ‘Twenty-One Years of the National Art Collections Fund’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 44.253 (1924), p. 179.

12. 12.  The Scottish Modern Arts Association (established 1908) and Contemporary Art Society (established 1910) organised along similar lines to the NACF to champion the work of living artists. In 1931 the Friends of the National Libraries (now Friends of the Nations’ Libraries) took on the work of saving rare books and manuscripts for public collections. Regional funds were also established, such as the Leeds Art Collections Fund (later Leeds Art Fund) in 1912.

13. 13.  A. R. Upchurch, The Origins of the Arts Council Movement: Philanthropy and Policy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 77–102.

14. 14.  J. Stancliffe (ed.), Saved for Scotland: Works of Art Acquired with the Help of the National Art Collections Fund (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 1991); A. Wilson, National Art Collecting: A Celebration of the National Art Collections Fund (London: Laurence King, 1993); and M. Bailey and R. Verdi (eds.), Saved! 100 Years of the National Art Collections Fund (London: Scala, 2003). For instance, the NACF is a protagonist in J. Conlin, The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery (London: Pallas Athene, 2006).

15. 15.  Geddes Poole, Stewards of the Nation’s Art, p. 127.

16. 16.  J. Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 152; M. Clarke, ‘ “The Greatest Living Critic”: Christiana Herringham and the Practice of Connoisseurship’, Visual Resources, 33 (2017), pp. 94–117; S. Avery-Quash and C. Riding, ‘Two Hundred Years of Women Benefactors at the National Gallery: An Exercise in Mapping Uncharted Territory’, Journal of Art Historiography, 23 (2020), p. 45; T. Stammers, ‘Women Collectors and Cultural Philanthropy’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 31 (2021).

17. 17.  ‘Art Treasures: Romantic Growth of Purchase Fund’, Scotsman, 11 January 1930, p. 14. From the outset individual women had been able to join the NACF as full, voting members on the same terms as men. Women were heavily outnumbered on its Council and as Local Representatives, however, and no women served on the NACF Executive Committee during the interwar period.

18. 18.  M. Lago, Christiana Herringham, pp. 123–43; B. Pezzini, ‘Days with Velázquez: When Charles Lewis Hind Bought the “Rokeby Venus” for Lockett Agnew’, The Burlington Magazine, 158.1358 (2016), pp. 358–67.

19. 19.  Bailkin, Culture of Property, pp. 118–58; J. Howard, ‘The One That Didn’t Get Away: New Light on the Sale of Holbein’s Duchess of Milan’, Journal of the History of Collections, 34 (2022), pp. 141–56.

20. 20.  J. Minihan, The Nationalization of Culture: The Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain (New York: New York University Press, 1977), pp. 183–4.

21. 21.  D. Moore, Insane Acquaintances: Visual Modernism and Public Taste in Britain, 1910–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 60–82; E. West, ‘ “Within the Reach of All”: Bringing Art to the People in Interwar Britain’, Modernist Cultures, 15 (2020), pp. 225–52; M. Herrero and T. R. Buckley, ‘Collaborating Profitably? The Fundraising Practices of the Contemporary Art Society’, Business History, 65 (2023), pp. 1–23.

22. 22.  D. Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 145–69.

23. 23.  H. Egginton, ‘Popular Antique Collecting and the Second-Hand Trade in Britain, c.1868–1939’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (2017).

24. 24.  A. Stephenson, ‘Strategies of Display and Modes of Consumption in London Art Galleries in the Interwar Years’, in P. Fletcher and A. Helmreich (eds.), The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 98–125.

25. 25.  Quoted in A. Burton, Vision & Accident: The Story of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London: V&A Publications, 1999), p. 183. H. Egginton, ‘In Quest of the Antique: The Bazaar, Exchange and Mart and the Democratization of Collecting, 1926–42’, Twentieth Century British History, 28 (2017), pp. 159–85.

26. 26.  R. C. Witt, ‘The National Art-Collections Fund’, The Studio, 131 (1946), p. 44.

27. 27.  Now BL Yates Thompson MS 26. O. Baskerville and L. Cleaver, ‘The Purchase of the Life of St Cuthbert for the Nation: Art, History and Politics, c.1903–1920’, in V. Lucherini and C. Voyer (eds.), Le Livre Enluminé Médiéval Instrument Politique (Rome: Viella, 2021), pp. 159–77.

28. 28.  NACF, Twenty-Fifth Annual Report (London, 1928), pp. 13–14.

29. 29.  National Art Collections Fund Archive, Tate Archive, London, TGA [hereafter NACFA] 9328.2.2.1, ‘Annual Lists of Acquisitions’ file, nos. 631–1190, 1928–1939.

30. 30.  NACF, Thirty-Fifth Annual Report (London, 1938), p. 14.

31. 31.  Geddes Poole, Stewards of the Nation’s Art, pp. 102–4.

32. 32.  K. Clark, Another Part of the Wood: A Self Portrait (London: Harper Collins, 1974), p. 225.

33. 33.  R. C. Witt, How to Look at Pictures (London: George Bell, 1902), pp. ii, xiv. See also R. C. Witt, One Hundred Masterpieces of Painting (London: Methuen, 1910).

34. 34.  See, for example, I. Scaglia, ‘ “Beauty Has Ever a Healing Touch”: Visible Internationalism at the 1927 Exhibition of Flemish and Belgian Art in London’, Contemporary European History, 33 (2024), pp. 323–37.

35. 35.  NACF, Twenty-Sixth Annual Report (London, 1929), p. 17.

36. 36.  A. Martin and D. Farr, ‘Witt, Sir Robert Clermont (1872–1952), Art Collector’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); NACFA, 9328.9.1.1, correspondence regarding the Witt Library, 1924–38.

37. 37.  R. C. Witt, ‘To the Editor of the Times: The Exodus of Art Treasures’, The Times, 5 November 1919, p. 8.

38. 38.  Waterfield, The People’s Galleries, pp. 300–301.

39. 39.  R. C. Witt, The Nation’s Art Treasures (London: William Heinemann, 1911), pp. 9–10; Pezzini, ‘(Inter)national Art’, p. 134.

40. 40.  Witt, Nation’s Art Treasures, pp. 28–9.

41. 41.  See, for example, the annotation by a secretary: ‘Sir Robert—You might like this for your speech’ next to a statement from a woman member from Bounds Green on the ‘happiness and delight’ her membership privileges had given her, in NACFA 9328.3.3.31, Special Events correspondence, letter dated 2 June 1931.

42. 42.  R. C. Witt, How to Look at Pictures, 3rd edn (London: George Bell, 1920), pp. 161–70. See also ‘Making Museums as Jolly as Dances: Expert’s Hints on How to Attract the Public’, Daily Chronicle, 8 July 1926, p. 5. On the Miers report, see Waterfield, The People’s Galleries, p. 320.

43. 43.  NACF, Thirty-Fourth Annual Report (London, 1937), p. 13.

44. 44.  R. C. Witt, ‘To the Editor of The Times: Art and the Nation’, The Times, 22 February 1921, p. 11.

45. 45.  NACF, Twenty-First Annual Report (London, 1924), p. 10.

46. 46.  NACFA, 9328.5.1.1, letter from Sir Alec Martin to J. Ramsay MacDonald, 9 July 1937.

47. 47.  NACFA, 9328.5.1.2, ‘The Nation’s Art Treasures’, script for BBC broadcast, 2LO, London, 12 May 1927.

48. 48.  NACF, Thirty-Third Annual Report (London, 1936), p. 11–12.

49. 49.  NACFA, 9328.5.1.1, G.R. Barnes, BBC, to Sir Robert Witt, 7 October 1937.

50. 50.  NACFA, 9328.5.1.1, ‘Collecting for a Nation’, copy annotated by G.R. Barnes.

51. 51.  NACFA, 9328.5.1.1, letters from listeners, 3–11 November 1937.

52. 52.  Bailey and Verdi, eds., Saved!, p. 63. See, for example, London Transport Museum Collection 83/4/1132, www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/collections-online/posters/item/1983-4-1132 (accessed 25 April 2024).

53. 53.  NACFA, 9328.3.1.11, ‘Ideas for Publicity’ file.

54. 54.  NACF, Thirtieth Annual Report (London, 1933), p. 10.

55. 55.  NACFA, 9328.3.1.6, ‘Names and Addresses of Suggested Members’ form, n.d. [c.1920s–30s].

56. 56.  NACFA, 9328.3.1.6, ‘Circular: Sent to Various London Clubs’, 24 October 1933; 9328.9.5.28, correspondence regarding collection boxes in museums, 1926–1939.

57. 57.  NACFA, 9328.5.1.16, letter from NACF Secretary to Harold Pontefract, Bazaar, 14 November 1927.

58. 58.  NACFA, 9328.5.1.6, letter from E. G. Halton, Old Furniture, 4 May 1928; letter from W. D. Bowman, Amateur Artist and Collector, 18 October 1927.

59. 59.  NACFA, 9328.5.1.6, ‘Correspondence with Periodicals’ file. For instance, the NACF confirmed that ‘we have, several times, secured new members as a result’ of placing advertisements in the Bazaar; letter from NACF Secretary to the Editor, Bazaar, 15 May 1935.

60. 60.  NACFA, 9328.3.1.1, lists of members by county, undated [c.1929].

61. 61.  NACFA, 9328.3.1.1, letters from members on increasing county subscriptions, 1929.

62. 62.  NACFA, 9328.2.8.1, letter from F. C. Morgan, Hereford Museum, 29 February 1936.

63. 63.  NACFA, 9328.3.3.69, letter from NACF Secretary to Kenneth Clark, National Gallery, 6 November 1934; 9328.3.3.31, pro forma request letter to collection owners, undated [c.1931].

64. 64.  ‘A London Letter: At Burlington House’, Yorkshire Post, 3 January 1930, p. 6.

65. 65.  NACFA, 9328.3.3.106, ‘Suggested visits’ file, 1927–38.

66. 66.  See, for example, NACFA, 9328.3.3.33, letter from Witt to Robert Benson, Dorchester House, 30 June 1924; 9328.3.3.67, letter from NACF Secretary to secretary, Bath House, Piccadilly, 6 June 1934.

67. 67.  NACFA, 9328.3.3.69, letter from Witt to Kenneth Clark, National Gallery, 9 March 1935.

68. 68.  ‘Editorial: Pomp and Circumstances’, Country Life, 26 May 1934, p. 528.

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