MUSEUMS and galleries have so little money to acquire works of art that the tradition of collecting may become “a thing of the past”, a report said yesterday.

Treasures critical to the nation’s heritage are being lost overseas because purchase funds are no longer available to public collections, The Collecting Challenge, the first comprehensive study of museum collecting in Britain, said.

It found that most museums have given up active collecting.By value, almost 90 per cent of objects that are initially stopped from being exported, to give institutions a chance to raise the money to buy them, are now leaving British shores.

Across the Channel, the Louvre alone spends more on acquisitions than all the British nationals put together receive in government money.

The research was conducted by the Art Fund, Britain’s largest art charity, which said that a deterioration over the past decade had reached crisis point. Only 10 per cent of museums can now afford to allocate a fixed proportion of their income to collecting.

Only 2 per cent cite collecting as a top priority — even though it should be a core activity to keep museums alive.

This month the Tate watched helplessly as William Blake’s rediscovered drawings for Robert Blair’s poem The Grave were auctioned by Sotheby’s in New York. Not only did the Louvre acquire one for a record £868,000, but eight of the nineteen were left unsold.

It was the worst outcome for everyone. A significant collection had been broken up and the owner received less than he would have done if he had sold to the Tate in the first place. It had offered £4.2 million. The sale proceeds, £3.9 million, fell far short of Sotheby’s minimum estimate of £6.8 million.

The Art Fund’s report highlighted “a failure by central and local government to recognise the importance of collecting to the life of our museums”.

The research, which involved more than 300 institutions, exposed “massive gulfs” between different types of museums and across regions, with the East Midlands, East of England and West Midlands the poorest.

David Barrie, the fund’s director, said: “These figures . . . put real facts behind concerns we and the sector have had for some time. Some of them are pretty bloody startling.” He called for the Government to be more positive, saying collections were at the heart of museums: “They must be continually enriched and renewed to keep our museums vibrant and appealing, to educate and inform now and in the future.” About 70 per cent rely on acquiring objects as gifts. Noting that 95 per cent of the objects donated were of little monetary value, Mr Barrie added: “You don’t necessarily end up with things you want.”

The research also uncovered an alarming trend — that the focus on improving education, access and social inclusion was diverting museums from building their collections. Mr Barrie said that, as much as the fund recognised the importance of education programmes,. collecting must take place alongside them: “Museums that stop collecting . . . will fossilise and become petrified like flies in amber.”

Recalling the excitement when the National Gallery bought George Stubbs’s iconic Whistlejacket, a lifesize rearing racehorse, for £11 million in 1997, he said: “They weren’t required to tour it all over the country . . . That is the kind of thing they are experiencing now.” Such programmes were expensive to stage, he said.

The fund offers grants — last year they totalled more than £4 million — to help museums and galleries to enrich collections. About 80,000 people fund its work in return for admission concessions.

Mr Barrie said: “Last year we were the single largest contributor to the funding of acquisitions. It’s hopeless. We should not be central to this. Our role should be to support.”

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Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Elderly Man (£9.3m), sold 1999 to Mauritshuis Museum, The Hague

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