Jewish Collectors and Donors at the National Gallery

This project interrogates the Jewish contribution to the making of the National Gallery. Despite the importance of many Jewish collectors associated with the Gallery - including Alfred de Rothschild, Ludwig Mond, Walter Samuel, 2nd Viscount Bearsted - these men and women have never been studied as a group in relation to the growth of the institution. Focusing on the period from the foundation of the National Gallery (1824) to the end of the Second World (1945), this project will investigate the role of Jewish donors, dealers and trustees in constructing the collections and in administering the institution. The project will consider what, if anything, was distinctive about Jewish taste in painting, and uncover the motivations behind acts of philanthropy on the part of this cultural minority. It will reconstruct the Jewish presence within networks of kinship, business and sociability that sustained the National Gallery in an era of dramatic expansion yet economic hardship and analyse the dynamics which resulted in paintings owned by eminent Jewish collectors entering the public domain in the era before the Holocaust. Although centred on the holdings of the National Gallery, this interdisciplinary doctoral project will reveal links with other houses and museums in Britain and beyond, and put to work methodologies derived from art history, social and cultural history, the history of collecting and the history of the art market. In addition to its historic interest, the project fits with a contemporary desire for museums to be more reflexive about their origins and to discover the diverse histories they contain and can narrate. In this way, the project fits with contemporary agendas at the Gallery as it moves towards the bicentenary of its foundation in 2024.

Among the central questions for this doctoral research project are:
- What does the development of the National Gallery and its collections reveal about Jewish cultural philanthropy in the period, c.1830-1945? How does the donation of paintings compare with other types of gift?- How did the intensity of Jewish involvement with the National Gallery vary over this period? How did the Jewish participation compare with that of other groups? Did gender, social status, age or national background influence how collectors engaged with the Gallery?- What contribution did Jewish trustees make to the direction and management of the National Gallery in the hundred years of its existence?- How significant was the contribution of Jewish dealers to the formation of the National Gallery collections? How far did Jewish dealers and collectors mobilise wider European relationships and cultural trends?- Why has this Jewish contribution been obscured within institutional memory? How should that be rectified?