IN A YEAR in which visits to the United Kingdom’s national museums declined overall, the British Museum bucked the trend. With 6.42 million visits in 2015–16, it was the country’s top attraction for the ninth year running. It is hard to remember a time when it played second fiddle to the previous longstanding front-runner, Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
IN MARCH 1926, at a time of cautious diplomacy between the Soviet Union and Britain, the British Museum, London, received a gift of 218 Russian prints presented by a group of twenty Russian artists. The impetus for the donation was a gift of prints by the British artist Frank Brangwyn to the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts in the late summer of 1925.1
IN RECENT YEARS we have been blessed with exhibitions that have moved beyond the hierarchies of technique and in which the ‘fine arts’ are placed within the context of the ‘decorative arts’, or, from a more enlightened point of view, in which the histories of art and of material culture are seen to be one and the same thing.