Rare painting secured for UK in unique deal with cosmetics heir
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Version 0 of 1. A rare medieval panel has been effectively gifted to the National Gallery in an unusual deal that will see it shared, until his death, with the man stumping up nearly £5m ($7.8m) to buy it, the US cosmetics heir and philanthropist Ronald S Lauder. Giovanni da Rimini’s Scenes from the Lives of the Virgin and Other Saints had been in the collection of the Dukes of Northumberland, at Alnwick Castle, since 1853, until it was sold at auction last summer. The government placed a temporary export bar on the 700-year-old painting, giving a UK gallery time to raise the required £4.9m to buy it – a near-impossibility in these financially straitened times. Now, 71-year-old Lauder has stepped in, giving the National Gallery the funds on condition it will be loaned to him in his lifetime. As part of the deal, it will be displayed at the gallery in 2017 and once every three years after that. After Lauder’s death, it will hang in the National Gallery permanently. Sir Nicholas Penny, the director of the gallery, said they were very grateful to Lauder. “He has helped us to find an imaginative way of sharing this rare and exquisite painting. “His generous gift to the National Gallery, to the British public and to all visitors to this great collection is an act of extraordinary generosity.” New York-born Lauder is the son of Estée and Joseph Lauder, who founded the Estée Lauder cosmetics companies. He has served as US ambassador to Austria, failed in a bid to be Republican candidate for mayor of New York, losing to Rudy Giuliani, and has served as president of the World Jewish Congress since 2007. His fabulous wealth and love of art led him to set up the Neue Galerie in New York, which contains a jaw-dropping collection of German and Austrian art by such greats as Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. The newly bought medieval panel, the left half of a diptych, is the only high quality work from Rimini still in Britain and fills a gap for the gallery. Giovanni da Rimini was one of a small group of artists who, for a short period in the early 14th century, made the Italian port city of Rimini a centre of some of the most innovative painting in Europe. With an emphasis on observation and realism, it is from a time when western art, as we know it, was being born. Caroline Campbell, the National Gallery’s curator of Italian paintings before 1500, called it “a transformative acquisition” for the organisation. “This beautiful and unique work, inspired by Byzantine icons as well as the more naturalistic western European style, means that we’ll be able to give our visitors a different and more engaging start to the remarkable story of painting, which is displayed, with unique completeness, on the National Gallery’s walls.” The Lauder deal, which was approved by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, is an unusual one but not unprecedented. In 2004, the National Gallery acquired a stupendous pair of 18th-century French landscapes – once owned by Clive of India – by Claude-Joseph Vernet. Calme: A Landscape at Sunset with Fisherman Returning With Their Catch and Tempête: A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas (1773) were bought for £2.4m thanks to a gift from the US petrochemicals tycoon David H Koch. They were displayed at the gallery in 2005 before being shipped to Koch’s home in America – they will return to London on his death. |