There's a common perception among ship modelers that museums routinely commission ship models. They don't.
There was a time, in the first half of the twentieth century, when a couple of major maritime museums did do such things. The Mariners' Museum, where I used to work, set up a model shop in its early days (the early thirties through the late forties). That shop built a series of a couple of dozen models that formed a key part of the museum's basic collection, showing the visitor what a contemporary freighter, liner, tugboat, etc. looked like. Most of them, I think, were contemporary subjects. A few were historical - the Monitor and the Merrimac (the latter pre- and post-conversion to ironclad), the early iron steamer Michigan, a late-nineteenth-century freighter, and a few others. I'm not sure when that model shop closed; it was decades before my time. During my three years at the museum it never commissioned a model. Our normal policy (to which we did make occasional exceptions) was to collect only models that were contemporary with the ships they represented. That is, if we had the opportunity to acquire a model of a whaleship that had been built by a whaler in the nineteenth century, we'd probably acquire it. But the most outstanding model of the Charles W. Morgan built by a modern modeler wouldn't be of interest to us. (Largely at my urging, we did make exceptions. I conducted a modest - and not really successful - effort to collect models by famous, influential modern modelers. I managed to get a small, not-really-representative one by Norman Ough, and Donald McNarry's eighteenth-century ceremonial barge. And a few years before I got there the museum had acquired Harold Hahn's famous colonial shipyard diorama. And, of course, the Crabtree Collection has been a major attraction of the institution since the early fifties.) Our policy regarding marine paintings was similar. Even mediocre pictures that were contemporary with the events they depicted got our attention, but we wouldn't have been interested in a modern painting of the Battle of Trafalgar - no matter how well executed.
After I left, in 1983, the museum did commission a handful of models to serve educational purposes in its new gallery on the history of exploration. So far as I know, it hasn't commissioned any since. And the notorious Mariners' Museum Scale Ship Modeling Competition, which used to put the institution on the modeling community's map every five years, has been discontinued. I don't have anything to do with that museum these days, but I have the strong impression that ship models are not high on its list of priorities. I wonder, in fact, if any of the current staff members have any real interest in model building.
Also in the thirties through the fifties, Howard I. Chapelle was building up a collection of commissioned models at the Smithsonian. It was quite an assortment. Some of them were based on original plans; some on plans Chapelle had drawn for his books; and some on commissioned plans by people like Merritt Edson. I don't know just how many models Chapelle commissioned, but the total must have approached a hundred. The Smithsonian also borrowed quite a few that the Navy Dept. had commissioned. (For a while, the Navy was having a model of each new warship class built. Maybe it still does.)
In the late seventies and early eighties the trend in maritime museums shifted away from the use of ship models as educational tools. When the Smithsonian opened its new Hall of Maritime Enterprise, in 1978 or thereabouts, it only included a small percentage of the models Chapelle had commissioned. The others were put in storage - and the Smithsonian spread the word among the museum community that the models were available for long-term loan, because the Smithsonian didn't intend ever to exhibit them again. A couple of years ago the Smithsonian opened a new, permanent exhibition on American military history. The old exhibition that "The Price of Freedom" replaced had included a considerable number of excellent warship models. (Remember that 1/48 Missouri?) The new gallery contains three or four. At the present time the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History is closed for a three-year renovation. As I understand it, a new gallery on maritime (non-naval) history is to open when the building re-opens. I have a feeling there won't be many models in it.
Maritime museums do not, in general, consider themselves custodians and exhibitors of modern ship modeling. Lots of the people who work in maritime museums come from academic or other backgrounds that have nothing to do with model building. (A model builder would, I suspect, be surprised to discover how few of the staff members at the typical maritime museum actually know anything about ships - let alone ship models.)
A few maritime museums do buy modern models, either on commission or when finished models become available. But too many ship modelers, I'm afraid, have the notion that maritime museums routinely build, or commission, models. It just doesn't work that way - any more than art museums hire people to paint pictures or sculpt statues. I wish there were more galleries exhibiting the work of skilled ship modelers. But most of the established maritime museums just don't see that as part of their function.