Venus in the Museum: Women’s Representations and the Rise of Public Art Institutions

Abstract

During the late nineteenth century, the role of the museum and art gallery in constituting British national identity became increasingly evident. The Museum Acts of 1845 and 1850, which allowed towns to use taxes to fund municipal museums, fuelled a massive increase in numbers. In 1850 there were fewer than sixty public museums; by 1887 there were more than 240, and by 1928, more than 500. Public funding aligned these museums with the national interest. So, too, did anxiety about the ‘art drain’, which emerged in the late 1890s as changing tax laws moved aristocrats to sell off their artwork to German and American collectors and museums. As art experts and connoisseurs called on the nation to protect its artistic patrimony, they constructed a new kind of imagined community: a nation defined through its communal ownership of great art.

For permission to include material in this essay derived from my book, Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2011), I extend thanks to the University Press of Virginia.