A grand design : the art of the Victoria and Albert Museum
/ General editors : Malcolm Baker and Brenda Richardson
- Baltimore, MD : Harry N. Abrams , 1997
- 431 p. : illus. ; 31 cm
Catalog of a traveling exhibition shown at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and other museums Oct. 1997-Jan. 2000.
Museums, collections, and their histories / Malcolm Baker The idealist enterprise and the applied arts / Michael Conforti The Victoria and Albert Museum : an illustrated chronology / Richard Dunn and Anthony Burton Industrial arts and the exhibition ideal / Peter Trippi Teaching by example : education and the formation of South Kensington's museums / Rafael Cardoso Denis An encyclopedia of treasures : the idea of the great collection / Timothy Stevens and Peter Trippi The empire of things : the engagement with the Orient / Partha Mitter and Craig Clunas National consciousness, national heritage, and the idea of "englishness" / Charles Saumarez Smith Collecting the twentieth century / Christopher Wilk
London's Victoria and Albert Museum houses one of the world's greatest art collections. Founded in 1852 as a pioneering museum of applied and decorative arts, today it has incomparable holdings spanning 2,000 years of artistic achievement in virtually every form: ceramics, metalwork, jewelry, furniture and woodwork, sculpture, textiles, paintings, drawings, and prints. A Grand Design, published in conjunction with a major traveling exhibition, brings together more than 250 of the V & A's finest treasures and recounts the institution's rich and vibrant history. Collectively, these splendid objects illustrate how the museum sought to establish a canon of excellence for the decorative arts by acquiring examples of superior craftsmanship, aesthetic beauty, and artistic merit from many of the world's cultures.