Art and archives

The Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum has always collected primary source material. This consists of artists’ letters, diaries, sitters’ books and various personal papers. Or it may be material of a more general kind: inventories, bills, unpublished articles, recipes for paints and varnishes and similar items of use to the Museum departments or to other readers. Occasionally in the past we have been offered material relating to a firm, a person, or a society, which consisted of a mixture of printed matter, photographs, original drawings, manuscript letters etc., which, when received in the Museum, would be divided among the relevant departments — the Library and the Department of Prints and Drawings in particular. The Library continues to acquire manuscript material of the kind mentioned above, and indeed in the last two years has pursued an active policy in this field. As a result we have acquired such varied items as the wardrobe accounts of the Empress Josephine for 1809 (2 large boxes of them), a 16th century herald’s sketchbook, an unpublished history of jade, and a letter from Sir William Nicholson to Siegfried Sassoon agreeing to illustrate ‘Memoirs of a fox-hunting man’. A list of the English accessions is published annually, and all acquisitions are notified to the National Register of Archives. Most of the items were acquired by purchase (e.g. from booksellers’ lists or auction sales), but there have also been some welcome donations.