Saved for the nation

The last time the Treasury (ie, we the taxpayer) stumped up cash for a painting it was £381,500 to help buy Titian’s ‘the death of Actaeon’ for £1.8m in 1972. Now Actaeon, painted by the same guy, different pose (he cropped up a fair bit in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which Titian must have liked), is on offer again, this time from the Duke of Sutherland, for the price of £50m, plus another Titian, again for £50m once we’ve swallowed the first. We are advised that these are bargain prices. Indeed, I have a feeling they are – it would imply inflation in artwork of less than 10% p.a. whereas it has gone up quite a bit more than that. But of course if we are never going to sell them the bargain is of less interest. We have to analyse this on a cost-benefit basis.

When I read the first reports it was a question of the National Gallery (which has, I think, 11 Titians) having had them since the war as a centrepiece and keeping them on. The National Gallery has something like 5 million visitors a year (albeit non paying), so it may well be this is not unreasonable: over a period of twenty years it is £1 a go excluding interest to see both. But further investigation tells us that they are in the National Gallery of Scotland, in Edinburgh. The NGS website doesn’t say how many visitors they have but it must be nothing like as many, maybe a million or fewer, and so the cost-benefit analysis equation is greatly altered. If you think this approach a little crude, remember that the alternative is not that the pictures are destroyed, it is that they are on view somewhere other than the UK. It would be easy to grant an export licence only if they were sold to someone who would display them.

Perhaps in these days of cheap foreign travel we should be looking in a different way about ‘saving pictures for the nation’. It would probably cost someone in Wales no more to see the pictures in the Guggenheim than to go to Edinburgh by train and spend the night in an expensive hotel.

I am wary of mentioning the other aspect of them being in Scotland that gives me doubts, but I will. People who yesterday were lauding the achievements of ‘their’ athletes (who were in fact competing for Team GB) now say the pictures must be saved for ‘the nation’, which means the whole of the UK is expected to pay, while the Scots have free prescriptions, no university fees and higher spending per head.

And I would be more comfortable about laying out £100m if I thought we were doing our best to preserve British arts (who else can be expected to do it?): not just in painting but literature, drama, sculpture, music (the National Lottery money goes largely towards funding productions of Italian Opera). A country's first (not only, but first) duty is to promote its own culture.

I don’t want to sound grumpy but I think we should let the Duke of Sutherland sell his pictures, tax him to the full (this must be a capital gain if ever I saw one), and spend that money on something more manageable. Like a museum of the British arts. If we’ve got any left after that we could buy the Raphael he also wants to flog off.

Unless Alex Salmond wants to chip in from the Scottish taxpayer.