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Sale of The Century
As the deadline approaches to save the Duke of Sutherland’s Titians for the nation, Ivan Lindsay assesses what the paintings and their potential loss will mean for Britain
In late August 2007, the National Gallery of Scotland, in Edinburgh, received the news it had been dreading for half a century: the Duke of Sutherland was calling in his loan. This loan was extended to the gallery in 1945 and consists of 33 artworks, including masterpieces by Poussin, Raphael, Rembrandt and Rubens. Its arrival transformed the gallery into a major European art destination.The current duke, Francis Egerton, 7th Duke of Sutherland, inherited the title and collection in 2000. In 2003, he sold a famous painting from the collection to the Gallery, Titian’s Venus Anadyomene; a beautiful image of a naked woman standing in the sea and wringing out her waist-length hair. The Duke sold it for £11m, around half its open-market valuation, although he did receive tax benefits, as allowable under British law on a sale to an institution. That purchase was funded with £7.6m from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, £2.5m from the Scottish Executive and contributions from the National Art Collections Fund with help from the Wolfson Foundation.
NThis time the Duke has proposed that the Gallery buy his two Titians, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, for a combined price of £100m.A spokesman for the Duke said: ‘The Bridgewater Collection has grown in value to the point where it is prudent to review the holding in terms of the balance of the family’s overall assets. It does now seem sensible to consider the sale of some part of this collection.’ Since the art collection is now estimated to be worth over £1bn without the Titians, one can understand how the Duke might feel overweight in art. Again, the deal would have tax benefits for the Duke as it would be a sale to an institution, but it is still a very generous offer as the paintings could be worth £300m on the open market.
He has proposed a cut-off date of 1 January 2009 for a down payment and a commitment from the gallery to buy Diana and Actaeon in instalments over three years and to buy Diana and Callisto in instalments from 2013. If they can meet this requirement, he will also leave the remaining pictures on loan to the gallery for a further 21 years.
John Leighton, director general of the National Galleries of Scotland, who is leading the campaign to save the pictures, says:‘It is tempting to see the sale as a crisis, but I prefer to see it as an opportunity.’ He has joined forces with the National Gallery, London to have the best chance of raising the enormous funds required, and they will share the pictures if successful. Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery, London, adds: ‘Now is not the best time to raise money; but the terms of the Duke’s offer are extraordinary.’
The two large canvasses, 190cm by 207cm, depict scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In one, the hunter Actaeon stumbles into a glade where Diana is bathing naked with her nymphs; in the other, Callisto is being stripped naked on Diana’s instructions to reveal her secret pregnancy by Jupiter. Both pictures contain a throng of voluptuous and sensual naked beauties in lush landscapes with deep shades of burgundy and lapis blue. These glorious, dramatic paintings are among Titian’s finest achievements. He referred to them as his ‘poesies’ or his poetry and painted a set of six of them, which are today split between the Wallace Collection, London; the Museo del Prado, Madrid; and the Isabella Gardner museum in Boston.
It would be hard to overestimate the importance of these two paintings. Whereas an artist such as Picasso produced around 10,000 paintings in his life, Titian left only a few hundred and most of these are already in museums. The only other paintings to have been bought by a national institution that could be considered as important would be the National Gallery’s acquisition of the Wilton Diptych in 1929 and Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in 1906.
There is an amusing irony that the paintings were originally commissioned by Phillip II of Spain, who loathed Elizabethan England and tried to invade with his armada of 130 ships in 1588. Sir Francis Drake, the former pirate turned Vice Admiral, famously insisted on finishing his game of bowls on Plymouth Sound as the Spanish fleet appeared over the horizon (knowing full well that the English fleet couldn’t get out of Plymouth harbour on the ebbing tide anyway). Drake destroyed the formation of the Spanish fleet off Calais with fire ships and harried them north as far as the Firth of Forth. Appalling weather off the Irish coast did the rest and only 67 ships made it back to Spain.
The two Titians remained in the Spanish royal collection until King Philip V gave them to the French ambassador, who sold them to Philippe II, Duke of Orléans and the Regent of France, 1715–1723, who amassed a superb collection. After the French Revolution the Duke sold his collection shortly before he was guillotined. The largest share of it was bought by the coal magnate, Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, in 1798, who understood the golden rule of art collecting for the rich: ignore fashion and buy the finest examples by the best artists of the past whose reputations have withstood the passage of time. He paid vast prices, though – within a very short time – they seemed a bargain.
On Bridgewater’s death the paintings passed to the dukes of Sutherland and were made available publically at Bridgewater House in London from 1806. In 1939 they were taken to Edinburgh for safekeeping (a wise decision as Bridgewater House was subsequently bombed) and placed on loan in the National Gallery of Scotland in 1945. The Duke has said that if the national galleries cannot meet his offer he will sell part of the collection, possibly the Titians, on the international market.
A frantic fundraising effort is in progress with contributions being sought from The Art Fund, the Scottish Executive, the British Parliament as well as the general public. Even the normally reclusive Lucien Freud gave a Channel 4 interview to help with the appeal, describing the paintings as ‘simply the most beautiful in the world’. In November, the campaign received a huge boost when The National Heritage Memorial Fund announced plans to donate £10m to keep Diana and Actaeon in the public realm.
For those doubters who are complaining that this is not the time to be buying expensive paintings it is worth recalling that tourism is one of the major earners for Britain, and the reasons most tourists give for visiting Britain are its history, beautiful villages, churches, landscape and museums. And it’s not just foreigners who enjoy its 4,500 open houses and museums – a visit to any gallery on a Saturday afternoon reveals that they are full of British people from all walks of life. To let these two paintings escape national patrimony would be nothing less than a tragedy.
You still have until 14 December to see the Diana and Actaeon at the National Gallery, London. To donate to the ‘Save the Titians Fund’, call 0131 624 6447 or visit http://www.nationalgalleries.org/aboutus/project/1:167/5903
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