Displaying items by tag: heritage lottery fund

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London announced that its Europe 1600–1815 galleries would finally open on December 9 following a £12.5m restoration, with £4.75m from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The project has been delayed due to a “complicated build”, according to a museum spokesman.

The new display of over 1,100 artefacts, from the museum’s collection of 17th- and 18th-century European art and design, will be complemented by a new commission from Cuban artists Los Carpinteros.

A house designed by the painter JMW Turner as a country home to share with his father will be saved from dereliction and opened permanently to the public through a £1.4m grant to be announced on Wednesday by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

“We are just so excited, it is superb news – this house is a national treasure, but it is in a sad, sad state, and if we had to get through another bad winter without knowing whether we could go ahead with restoration, it would be truly worrying,” said Rosemary Vaux, of the Turner House Trust.

Publicly funded museums that seek to sell off "the family silver" will face tougher sanctions from the body that overseas the UK's museums. The Museums Association (MA) is to tighten up its ethics code to avoid controversial sell-offs of valuable antiquities from cash-strapped museum collections.

It is also in talks with the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the Art Fund, and Arts Council England to establish a "joined-up response" to those selling important objects for financial gain. They are also investigating whether to launch an official list of at-risk collections.

Murals of "national importance" by war artist Evelyn Gibbs have been uncovered and repaired as part of the restoration of a Medieval church. The paintings were thought to have been destroyed during 1972 modernizations, but were discovered by electricians prior to the work starting.

A celebration event was held at St Martin's Church in Bilborough, Nottingham, on Saturday. The Heritage Lottery Fund gave £744,100 towards the restoration.

A total of 23 libraries and museums across the UK will be able to add to their core collections with a £5m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

The financial boost will enable the institutions to "go shopping" for new artifacts over a five-year period.

Among the projects to benefit from the cash is one to develop a collection on Polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.

The Wedgwood Collection, described as one of the most important industrial archives in the world, could be broken up and sold unless £2.7m is raised in just three months.

The Art Fund has launched a public appeal to save the vast collection of treasures held in Staffordshire including ceramics, manuscripts and paintings, which has been described by Unesco as “unparalleled in its diversity and breadth”.

The price of the collection was set at £15.7m, and the majority has been raised from the Art Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund and charitable trusts.

The Heritage Lottery Fund has given a $240,000 development grant to National Museums Liverpool to renovate the Lady Lever Art Gallery, which houses one of the UK’s finest collections of fine and decorative art. Renovation plans include returning over a quarter of the existing space to its original architecture and expanding galleries so that more of the collection can be made accessible to the public.

Sandra Penketh, the Gallery’s directory, said, “This project will transform the Gallery and breathe new life into the collections. It will also mean improved accessibility for visitors and greater educational resources for local schools and the community.” The Gallery’s initial grant allows it two years to submit a proposal for a more substantial bequest, which will ideally help them get closer to their £2.8 million fundraising goal.    

Founded in 1922 by the soap magnate William Lever, 1^st Viscount Leverhulme in honor of his late wife, the Lady Lever Art Gallery holds an outstanding collection of 18^th and 19^th century British paintings and furniture as well as a celebrated collection of Wedgwood pottery.

In February 2013, the British government placed a temporary export ban on two important oil paintings by George Stubbs (1724-1806), an English painter best know for his depictions of horses. The works, which went on display at London’s Royal Academy in 1773, gave the British public their first glimpse of a kangaroo and a dingo.

The export ban went into effect shortly after it was decided by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest that the paintings were of outstanding significance for the study of 18^th century exploration of Australia and the public dissemination of knowledge during the Enlightenment. The point of the export ban was to grant UK museums enough time to raise the £5.5 million necessary to keep the Stubbs paintings in the UK.

The National Maritime Museum in London has launched a £1.5 million bid to acquire Kongouro from New Holland (Kangaroo) and Portrait of a Large Dog (Dingo). The museum has already secured £3.2 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund and an additional £200,000 from the Art Fund. If the Maritime Museum’s appeal is successful, the paintings will initially go on display in the Queen’s House in Greenwich in 2014.

Stubbs created the Kongouro and Portrait of a Large Dog based on spoken accounts, as he had never actually seen the animals. It is believed that Sir Joseph Banks commissioned the paintings after assisting in Captain James Cook’s voyage to the Pacific. Following their completion, Stubbs won praise for bringing the likenesses of the foreign animals to the British public for the first time.