Britain must maintain its cultural inheritance

Recently, the Italian state made global headlines by acquiring a rare portrait by the Baroque pioneer Caravaggio for €30 million — one of the largest sums ever paid by the state for an artwork. 

The painting, an early portrait of Maffeo Barberini, the man who would later become Pope Urban VIII, is exceedingly rare. Out of an estimated 65 surviving works by Caravaggio, only three of these are portraits. Artworks such as this are important cultural artefacts, with Caravaggio in particular being emblematic today of the enduring prevalence of Italian cultural soft power. 

I have been fortunate to attend exhibitions of Caravaggio’s work in three nations of our United Kingdom. Through the art itself, and the wider commentary provided through descriptions and information booklets by the galleries that displayed the artworks, one learns much about Italian history, culture, and, importantly, what the nation places value on.

Acquisitions such as the Barberini portrait only serve as a stark contrast of how unable and unwilling our own country is to fund the preservation of important cultural and historical objects.

In Britain, state acquisitions of artworks do occur, but they are consistently on a much lower scale compared to Italy’s recent purchase, and, as is our custom, are funded through a depressing amalgamation of quango grants, public donations, and the limited government budget available for the arts.

Take the most expensive British artwork ever acquired by Britain: Sir Joshua Reynolds’ masterful Portrait of Omai, acquired in 2023. The National Portrait Gallery was unable to fund the £50 million price tag for acquisition, and so was obliged to partner with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to split the cost, and subsequently, the ownership of the artefact. Only £10 million of this amount came from the British state through an arms-length funding body, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, while a further £2.5 million was raised by the independent Art Fund. This constituted the largest ever grant from the Art Fund, which receives its funding from entirely outside of the British Government and the National Lottery. 

Similarly, the acquisition of one of Constable’s most renowned works, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, for just over £23 million, was only possible through a combination of millions of pounds of tax concessions on behalf of the vendor — the Barclay family — and the proceeds of lottery ticket sales. While the acquisition itself is a triumph, losing out on millions of pounds of tax revenue to that end is less so.

The willingness of the British people to aid in the acquisition of works like these, however, through the Art Fund, should be celebrated. For the £4.95 million purchase of Turner’s The Blue Rigi, the Government-funded National Heritage Memorial Fund was only able to commit £2 million, while members of the British public — patrons of the Art Fund — committed £550,000. One donation totalling £9.20 came from an eight-year-old boy who raided his piggy bank in an attempt to assist in the acquisition. Reports at the time lauded this coming-together as “a very British triumph”, but it wasn’t. It was pathetic. It was embarrassing that we, as a country, had to do this.

Any successful state should be able to pay for the acquisition of its most important cultural objects, without needing to rely on the population emptying the change out of their pockets. The financially impotent bureaucratic nightmare that is the British public coffers has descended into such a pitiful state, the result of which is a system that struggles to act in the national interest with speed or scale.  

The British state is not just competing with other nations for these important artworks. Private collectors routinely spend tens of millions of pounds on paintings largely for tax benefits and as an uncorrelated asset, the monetary value of which can often hold steady or increase in the face of traditional market crises. In short, it has little to do with the appreciation of the art itself. 

Gulf State museums have also entered the playing field with effectively unlimited resources, with Qatar and Saudi Arabia routinely spending sums in the region of hundreds of millions of pounds for works of art. The Qatari prince, Sheikh Saud Al-Thani, who served as the nation’s arts minister before his death in 2014, reportedly spent $1 billion on artwork for museums in Qatar in just seven years. This is an environment in which the impoverished British state is no longer able to compete in. While it would not generally be possible to compete with these states on the scale and total value of artworks, it ought to be possible for Britain to compete with them on the acquisition of select important works which it is in the national interest to own.

Britain once believed that its cultural inheritance was worth defending. No longer

The dire financial circumstances of the British arts sector are compounded by the country’s broader economic stagnation. Many cultural institutions are financially constrained, while others are entangled in complex, suffocating relationships with the state. The British Council, for example, is in debt to the Government to the tune of £200 million, while continuing to have projected losses in the tens of millions. Huge sums of money come and go between the arts sector and the Government, with very little in the public interest to show for it.

Britain once believed that its cultural inheritance was worth defending. No longer. As our once-great museums continue to acquiesce to foreign demands for our historic artefacts while we struggle to fund the acquisition of replacements, important British works continue to find their homes anywhere but Britain. It is yet another symptom of a Britain that seems to be rapidly slipping away from us.