Cutting off your Raphael to spite your face

The Sunday Times of London is reporting that efforts to keep Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks in the UK may founder, not over the purchase price, but over to whom it would be paid:

“If this painting is sold overseas it will be the greatest loss of any work of art from Britain since the 1970s,” said Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Gallery. “There was a clear understanding with the previous duke that if the painting were ever sold it would be offered to the National.”

Although the gallery will ask for the £20m, the lottery fund is preparing to spurn the plea in what is likely to be one of its most controversial decisions. Insiders say the lottery fund believes it will be face criticism if it gives such a large sum to a member of the landed gentry. . .

The gallery believes the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has recently spent £17m on Falmouth Maritime Museum and £12m on a museum in London’s Docklands (built but not yet open), has enough spare funding to give £20m towards the Raphael. The lottery board has been criticised by the culture department for having over-large reserves.

But a £20m grant for one painting is £5.4m more than it gave for all its art grants last year. Previously its largest single award for any painting was £8.2m for George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket, which went to the National. The gallery already has eight other Raphaels in its collection.

The Heritage Lottery Fund, which has about £300m for grants each year, is now more inclined to renovate inner cities and regenerate the regions. When it began in 1994 a greater proportion of its budget went to galleries, museums and collections, notably the £12m for the Churchill archives. That grant prompted criticism for handing over lottery money to one of Britain’s wealthiest families — a charge that could be repeated over the duke.

Four years ago the National Heritage Memorial Fund, which is part of the lottery fund, gave £5m towards the purchase by the British Library of another of the duke’s heirlooms, the Sherborne Missal manuscript. The deal enabled him to escape an inheritance tax bill of £5m.

For the gallery, the sale of the Raphael is particularly galling because without its expertise identifying the work as genuine the duke could not have commanded such a high price for it.

There's certainly something puzzling about not buying great paintings because rich people own them. Who on earth do they expect to buy such artworks from? Some appropriately deserving tradesman, perhaps.

Here's another article from the Guardian.

Posted by David on January 12, 2003 10:25 PM