Search FNL grants since 1931

Displaying 121 - 130 of 1973
Author: Mervyn Peake (1911-1968)
Item date: 20th century
Date acquired: 2019
Grant Value: £15,000 [Larkin Fund]
Item cost: £500,000
Institution: British Library
Town/City: London

Comprising 17 boxes and 182 framed items together with some loose papers, the archive includes Peake’s illustrations for classic works of literature including Treasure Island, Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm, The Hunting of the Snark and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as well as illustrations for his own novels (including Gormenghast), children’s books, plays, poetry and television projects. Also included are drawings of famous literary, theatrical and artistic figures, among them Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft. The archive contains unpublished material and rough sketches that are key to understanding Peake’s artistic and literary development.

Item date: 17th to 20th centuries
Date acquired: 2019
Grant Value: £20,000
Item cost: £562,000
Institution: Bodleian Library
Town/City: Oxford
County: Oxfordshire

The archive forms a key source for British and international history in the 18th -20th centuries, and is closely related to manuscripts and archives in the Bodleian, particularly the extensive political collections.

The private papers of George William Frederick Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon (1800-1870) are at the heart of the archive. He was a leading statesman of the early Victorian era, as ambassador to Spain, 1833-9, Lord Privy Seal, 1840, President of the Board of Trade 1846-7, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland 1847-52, Foreign Secretary 1853-8, 1865-6 and 1868-70, and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from 1864-5. His postings coincided with key moments of the era such as the Irish Famine and the Crimean War. His official papers were deposited in the Bodleian in 1949, and transferred to the Bodleian's ownership by Acceptance in Lieu and purchase in 2012 with FNL’s support.

Item date: 1558
Date acquired: 2019
Grant Value: £1,700
Item cost: £4,200
Institution: Royal Berkshire Archives (formerly Berks Record Office)
Town/City: Reading
County: Berkshire

The grant of the manor of Smewyns was made by the Crown to Sir John Norreys on 1 August 1558. It is written in ink on a single membrane of parchment and measures 475mm high by 687mm wide. The initial portrait letter shows Philip and Mary enthroned while there is additional decoration within and above a majuscule first line.

The grant provides rare evidence for this small manor. The physical manifestation of Smewyns is long gone, with parts of a medieval moat being the only trace of the original settlement. There are also very few surviving documents for Smewyns and no others at the Berkshire Record Office. It is possible that the grant provides the only full description of the manor’s extent.

Item date: 1818-1910
Date acquired: 2019
Grant Value: £5,850
Item cost: £5,850
Institution: Armitt Museum and Library, Ambleside
Town/City: Ambleside
County: Cumbria

This is a fascinating collection of documents covering a century of Westmorland Parliamentary Elections. The archive consists of 175 items: broadsides, leaflets and pamphlets, covering the period from 1818-1910 with significant collections from the 1826 and 1843 elections. These were politically turbulent times with electoral, agricultural and political reform at the forefront of the public mind, issues that were fought out at the local level through the hustings. During this period Westmorland was dominated by a landed elite, led by the Lowther family, Earls of Lonsdale. Henry Brougham was the long-standing Liberal candidate for Westmorland, and was MP for several constituencies outside the area.

Item date: Early 20th century
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £1,000 [Smaller Libraries Fund]
Item cost: £2,000
Institution: Weiner Library
Town/City: London

The Wiener Library is one of the world's leading and most extensive archives on the Holocaust and Nazi era. Formed in 1933, the Library's unique collection of over one million items includes published and unpublished works, press cuttings, photographs and eyewitness testimony. The poster collection contains 17 German posters covering a broad range of themes connected with the First World War, Communism, anti-Bolshevism and The Weimar Republic.

Author: Various including D G Rosetti
Item date: 19th century
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £10,000
Item cost: £21,900
Institution: Victoria & Albert Museum, National Art Library
Town/City: London

Constantine Ionides was one of a family of art collectors and patrons of Greek origin in Victorian London. In 1900 the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) accepted the bequest of his important picture collection, consisting of over 1,100 paintings, drawings and prints representing a wide variety of schools, periods and artists, including Old Masters, works of the 17th century and those by contemporary (19th-century) French and English artists, with many of whom Ionides was personally acquainted. The Ionides collection is one of the very few surviving undispersed Victorian collections of progressive art.

Ionides himself left little documentary evidence about his taste, relationships or collecting activity, so the surviving letters addressed to him shed precious light on the formation of the collection, on individual works within it, and on Ionides’s relations with artists and art world associates

Author: Robert Frost
Item date: 1914
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £3,000
Item cost: £5,915
Institution: Gloucester University
Town/City: Gloucester
County: Gloucestershire

On 20 June 2018 a significant collection of personal correspondence belonging to John Wilton Haines (1875 – 1960) was auctioned at Bonhams in London. Known as ‘Jack’ to his associates, he was a Gloucester-based solicitor, poet and botanist.

Author: Julia Margaret Cameron
Item date: 1875
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £12,000 [B.H. Breslauer Foundation Fund]
Item cost: £45,000
Institution: St Andrews University
Town/City: St Andrews
County: Fife

Idylls of the King is one of the most famous 19th-century collaborations between a poet and a photographer and a rare and invaluable source for the study of Tennyson's poetry and of Victorian culture.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) is one of the most celebrated women in the history of photography, known for her innovative work when photography was still in its infancy. Her photographs were rule-breaking: purposely out of focus, and often including smudges, scratches and other traces of the artist's process.

Author: David Parkes (1763-1833)
Item date: 1800-1830
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £1,500
Item cost: £7,000
Institution: Shropshire Archives
Town/City: Shrewsbury
County: Shropshire

In 2007 Shropshire Archives acquired, with support from the V&A Purchase grant fund and the Friends of the National Libraries, as well as local fundraising, volume two of David Parkes’ Sketches in Shropshire, which covered places alphabetically from Ludlow to Wem.

In 2018 Shropshire Archives had the opportunity to purchase privately volume one of this work, which includes over 160 original pencil, ink, and watercolour wash sketches of locations across the county listed from A-L. This was a fantastic opportunity to complete the acquisition of this important work by David Parkes, and something which the service had never expected to happen.

Item date: c. 1892
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £2,275 [Smaller Libraries Fund]
Item cost: £12,750
Institution: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum
Town/City: Bournemouth
County: Dorset

The Visitor Book of the Royal Bath Hotel, Bournemouth, which contains a treasure trove of signatures from the Victorian world including Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Merton and Annie Russell-Cotes, who founded the Museum, bought the Bath Hotel in 1876 and developed it as the Royal Bath Hotel to be one of the finest hotels in Britain, if not Europe, at the end of the 19th century. The rich and famous of the Victorian world beat a path to the hotel and the small and exclusive seaside resort of Bournemouth.