People in the UK should know that the Tate Gallery, being a publicly-funded museum, are required to make any items in their collection available for you to see on request. When studying sculpture I was really interested in a 1972 piece by Marcel Broothaers called Tractatus Logico-Catalogicus and noticed that the Tate had it in their collection. I emailed them and set up a time to visit a warehouse in SE London, and they brought it out for me to look at it. It's so much better than seeing things in a packed gallery, let alone a packed Tate, and you get a real sense of what the work is like in the flesh, stripped of all the spectacle and didactic trash that generally surrounds works in somewhere like the Tate.
Yes, it can be personal study. You don't need to be affiliated with an institution. Perhaps if you're asking to look at a Monet they might want a bit more information (Marcel Broodthaers isn't exactly a household name!), but if your hobby is painting and you want to study the brushstrokes I don't think they'd be able to turn you down - the whole point of these institutions is that they're paid for by the state, and by extension the taxes of its citizens.
Yeh that makes sense I guess. Conversely, a family of 4 turning up to get a private viewing doesn't seem in the spirit, even if it's their home-schooling art class.
I was curious with respect to places like the Tate that are really only partly state funded (30%) so I'd consider it reasonable for them to approve the most "worthy" 30% of requests.
I don’t know about museums but I do know that many public bodies in the UK will take enquiries from any member of the public, and will not automatically turn down requests - although such requests may go to the bottom of the priority queue if there are other requests of greater public interest.
