V&A Launches Provenance Webpage Addressing Colonial-Era Histories
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has opened a new collections webpage that places provenance, and the questions it raises, at the center of its public-facing research. Titled “How have objects come to be in the V&A?”, the page examines how works entered the museum and notes that some have histories marked by violence, coercion, or injustice, while others remain difficult to trace with certainty.
Launched on International Provenance Research Day, the site is presented as part of a broader effort to make collections research more visible. Tristram Hunt, the V&A’s director, said in an Instagram post that the project reflects the museum’s “institutional commitment to accountability and transparency” and draws on detailed scholarship by staff. He also pointed to the 1983 National Heritage Act, which limits the legal deaccession of museum objects except in specific cases, such as duplicates, irreparably damaged works, or transfers to another national collection.
According to the museum, the new hub gathers existing essays alongside a newly published text on Ethiopian collections. The V&A says it holds around 90 objects from Ethiopia, most of them connected in some way to the British military expedition to Ethiopia in 1867-68. That campaign culminated in the death of Emperor Tewodros II, the destruction of his fortress at Maqdala, and the looting of large quantities of Ethiopian material culture by the British Army.
The new text, written by provenance research curator Alexandra Watson Jones, says that objects taken at Maqdala, or collected during the expedition, are now found in the V&A alongside photographs, drawings, and archival material relating to the period. Among the best-known works are a solid gold chalice and a gold crown, both sacred objects from the Ethiopian Orthodox church. The Ethiopian government requested their restitution in 2007, and discussions about a long-term loan appear to have stalled.
Hunt also highlighted essays on the Asante Regalia, now at the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi, Ghana; the Maqdala material looted in 1868; and a 4,250-year-old Anatolian gold ewer from the Gilbert Collection, returned to Turkey in 2021. Other objects on the page include a nephrite jade circular plaque from Yuanming Yuan, looted in 1860 by the antiquary Thomas Dudley Fosbroke, and a 19th-century betel box from the regalia of King Thibaw of Burma, given to Britain in 1964 as a token of friendship.
The new webpage does not resolve the museum’s most difficult questions, but it does make them harder to ignore. In doing so, it places the V&A within a growing international effort to confront how collections were formed, and what transparency now requires.
