Books by Julius Bryant

By 1862, just a decade after its launch as a study collection for art and design, the Victoria and Albert Museum had become a reference resource for collectors, scholars and art-market experts. Enriching the V&A, the final volume in a trilogy of books on the museum's 19th-century history, describes how the young museum's rapid growth in the following decades was driven more by collectors, agents and dealers, through loans, gifts and bequests, than by the combined expertise, acquisitions policies and buying power of its directors and curators. The V&A soon became a collection of collections, embodying a new age of collecting that benefitted from the break-up of historic institutions and ancestral collections across Europe, and imperial expeditions in Asia and Africa. The industrial revolution had created a new social class with the resources to buy from the expanding art market, especially in the decorative arts. Many were touched by a new moral imperative to collect for the home, however humble, and to share their specialist knowledge and enthusiasm by lending to the new public museums. Enriching the V&A explores the formative influence on the museum, and on pioneering fields of scholarship, of the V&A's leading Victorian and Edwardian benefactors. It also shares uncomfortable truths about the sources of some objects from the age of empires and shows how the meanings of things can change through the transformation of private property into public museum collections.

This book tells the storyof the formative years of London's world-renowned Victoria and Albert Museumand the gathering of its early collections in the decade between the GreatExhibition of 1851 and the death of Prince Albert in 1861.

This unique history brings together more than 150 spectacular objects from the National Art Library's collection of literature, prints, drawings and photographs.

With a career spanning more than sixty years, Anthony Caro (b 1924) is one of Britain's most acclaimed and best-known sculptors. This book accompanies the first survey exhibition of his work in an American museum since his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975.