Plus our survey of the year’s most important museum acquisitions
In the spring of , while scouting for film locations in Kent, Derek Jarman stopped for lunch at Dungeness. Going for a walk afterwards, he glimpsed a ‘For Sale’ notice outside a fisherman’s dwelling he had long coveted, and so not long after became the owner of Prospect Cottage (Fig. ). Jarman had enjoyed a distinguished career as a painter, a writer, a set designer for both stage and screen, and a film-maker, and the cottage was where his later projects were conceived and planned. The remarkable garden he made there became a major creative focus of his final years (Fig. ). Together, the cottage and garden form a kind of idiosyncratic self-portrait, and it seems wholly appropriate that both should now have been acquired by the Art Fund for the nation. Creative Folkestone has become the custodian of Prospect Cottage, and Jarman’s archive – which includes notebooks, letters and photographs – will go on long-term loan to the Tate Archive.
This acquisition is also important because it had genuine popular support: the Art Fund’s appeal resulted in more than
, individual donations from the public in just weeks. Jarman had touched many lives, not only through his wideranging body of work but as a vociferous campaigner for gay