The Art Fund

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The Art Fund (previously known as The National Art Collections Fund) is an independent membership-based British charity. The Art Fund was founded in 1903 in order to help museums and galleries acquire works of art. It relies on members' subscriptions and public donations for funds and does not receive funding from the government or the National Lottery. It has assisted in the acquisition of over 860,000 works of art of every kind from all over the world – including many of the most famous objects in British public collections, such Velázquez's Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, Picasso's Weeping Woman in Tate Modern, and the Iron Age Snettisham Hoard in the British Museum.

The founders of The Art Fund, who included Christiana Herringham, D. S. MacColl and Roger Fry, were prompted by what they saw as the inadequacy of government funding of museums, which is still seen as a problem by the Fund today. The original idea for such a charity can be traced to a lecture given by John Ruskin in 1857 when he called for the establishment of a "great society" to save works of art for public collections and "watch over" them. The Art Fund now has 80,000 members and apart from giving grants, acts as a channel for many gifts and bequests, as well as lobbying on behalf of museums and galleries and their users.

In 2005 the Fund was caught up in the controversy surrounding the purchase by the Tate Gallery of the The Upper Room (paintings) by Chris Ofili. And in 2006 it was caught out, when it was discovered that the Amarna Princess, purportedly an ancient Egyptian sculpture, was actually a forgery by Shaun Greenhalgh.