Victoria and Albert Museum | History, Collections, & Facts (2024)

Victoria and Albert Museum, British museum that houses what is generally regarded as the world’s greatest collection of the decorative arts. It is located in South Kensington, London, near the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum.

The foundation of the museum dates from 1852, when the British government established the Museum of Manufacturers in Marlborough House, St. James. This museum largely housed a collection of decorative arts objects that had been displayed at the Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. The items were transferred to the South Kensington Museum and redisplayed in 1857 as part of a government effort to improve taste and knowledge among those concerned with British manufactures. The collection soon outgrew its premises, and plans for a new museum were developed. The museum was renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899, when Queen Victoria laid the cornerstone for the present building, designed by Sir Aston Webb. This structure opened in 1909. Since then the museum’s premises have been modified and extended, partly into adjacent buildings. The Victoria and Albert Museum is also responsible for the Museum of Childhood, in Bethnal Green, a district in the borough of Tower Hamlets. The Wellington Museum, in Apsley House, at the southeastern corner of Hyde Park, and the Theatre Museum, near Covent Garden, Westminster, were branches of the Victoria and Albert Museum until the 2000s. Maintenance of the Apsley House was turned over to English Heritage in 2004, and the Theatre Museum closed in 2007, with some of the collection moving to South Kensington. The V&A Dundee, an outpost of the museum centring on Scottish design, opened in Scotland in 2018.

The Victoria and Albert Museum houses vast tableaux of European sculpture, ceramics (including porcelain and other pottery), furniture, metalwork, jewelry, and textiles from early medieval times to the present day. It includes the Jones bequest of French furniture, porcelain, and other objets d’art; the Schreiber group of English ceramics, enamelwork, and glass; the Currie collection, containing fine Italian and French arms and armour; and 18th-century German porcelain that forms part of the Murray collection. There are strong sets of Indian art, which were given an early impetus with the acquisition of materials from the East India Company’s museum after it was closed in 1858. The East Asian artworks include remarkable Chinese ceramics, jade, and sculpture from the Eumorfopoulos collection. The museum also houses the national collection of British watercolours, miniatures, prints, and drawings, among which is an outstanding group of works by John Constable. The Italian Renaissance and Baroque sculptures are some of the best outside Italy. In 2014 the V&A pioneered a program of so-called rapid response collecting, wherein the museum promptly acquired objects from significant moments in recent history. Pieces include the puss*hat, a knitted pink hat worn by participants in the 2017 Women’s March, and an Xbox adaptive controller, a device released in 2018 to improve the accessibility of video games. The museum also houses the National Art Library.