Your support in action – autumn round-up 2024
Discover works of art that we've helped museums to acquire recently, thanks to the support of Art Fund's members and donors.
Did you know? Every year, we give between £3m and £4m to help museums and galleries acquire important works of art for their public collections, so that we all get to share in great art and culture.
Keep reading to discover some recent acquisitions that have been made possible with Art Fund support, from a significant collection of photographs documenting South Wales' mining community to a ceramic pot by leading contemporary artist Grayson Perry.
These acquisitions are made possible thanks to the vital support of Art Fund members and donors. Eager to see more? Art Quarterly, our exclusive magazine for members, details all the brilliant objects and works of art that we've helped museums to buy and share with the public.
And if you'd like to experience these works in person, don't forget to pack a National Art Pass for great benefits at every venue.
Photographs of South Wales' mining community
99 prints by seven photographers depicting life in the South Wales coalfield have been acquired by Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales. This major purchase has been made possible by an Art Fund New Collecting Award given in 2017 to Bronwen Colquhoun, Museum Wales’ senior curator of photography. Among the first set of works that Colquhoun acquired for the project is a portfolio of 10 pictures taken in 1965 by the American photographer Bruce Davidson.
The largest collection of photographs in the acquisition is a series of 63 pictures by Kjell-Åke Andersson, a Swedish photographer and filmmaker. In 1973, he came from Sweden to South Wales to document the mining communities he had seen in the seminal 1950s images by the American photographer W Eugene Smith. Andersson and his family were welcomed into the home of a mining family in Bargoed. ‘It became a 12-year project,’ explains Colquhoun. ‘You get a real sense of the women and children as well as the miners in his pictures, which is a testament to the relationship he built with the community.’
Reuniting a major oil painting with its preparatory sketches
Lucy Kemp-Welch sketched these studies of horses in preparation for her large-scale oil painting Gypsy Horse Drovers, which is in the collection of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum. The picture was a breakthrough work for the artist, who became famous for her equine paintings and for her illustrations for the children’s book Black Beauty (1915).
In 1894, Kemp-Welch rapidly sketched a group of Roma men driving horses past her home in Bushey onto her paintbox lid. The further studies in this acquisition illustrate how the initial sketch developed into the finished painting, which she exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895. These now join the original sketch on the paintbox lid (gifted by Kemp-Welch to the museum in 1956) and the finished painting to make a complete record of this celebrated picture.
A Grayson Perry pot
A large cast of characters from British history and society appear on this ceramic pot by Grayson Perry. Margaret Thatcher, King Charles III, Queen Camilla, Elton John, Nicola Sturgeon and JK Rowling are among the famous people depicted, while at the centre of the action are Perry’s alter ego, Claire, and his childhood teddy bear, Alan Measles.
Perry won the Turner Prize in 2003 and exhibited this pot in his solo show Smash Hits at the National Galleries of Scotland (Royal Scottish Academy) in 2023. It now joins the collection at Aberdeen Art Gallery, where its narrative content provides rich material for debate on contemporary issues including gender identity, nationalism, mental health and spirituality.