The National Gallery and the Slave Trade
November 14 2014
Picture: National Gallery
I haven't yet seen Frederick Wiseman's new (much admired) documentary on the National Gallery, but I was interested to see in this review in The New Yorker that the film contains a scene in which:
[...] a guide recounts for a group of black youths the founding of the National Gallery, in 1824, with wealth derived in large part from the slave trade. The question of what to make of that hangs in the air. It must matter. How?
I know I should really see the scene, and listen to the guide's full description, before making any comment on this. In fact, probably in today's climate of hyper-sensitivity I shouldn't really make any comment on it at all. But it says 'opinions' at the top of this blog, and sometimes they're shot from the hip.
The thing is, there's something about the 'I'm talking to black youths so I must mention the slave trade' assumption that I find just a little depressing in this context. Would we introduce all school groups, who one supposes are there for their first time, to art at the National Gallery this way? I doubt it.
Now, I'm not saying that we should gloss over any aspect of the slave trade and its legacy in any way. But I think it's fair to point out that it's not as easy to draw the National Gallery as an institution into the story of slavery as many think (and as the guide in Wiseman's film seems to think).
Nowadays it's often commonly stated that the National Gallery was indeed founded with 'wealth derived from the slave trade'. This assertion centres on the collection of John Julius Angerstein (above), who made his money in marine insurance, often under-writing slave ships. His 38 paintings were one of the group of works that formed the National's original collection.
However, it's worth noting that Angerstein's collection was not donated to the National Gallery, but bought by the government for £57,000 in 1823. Other what we might call 'founder collections' came from the likes of Sir George Beaumont and the Rev. William Holwell Carr, and these were donated, and, as far as I can tell, were not acquired with money connected to the slave trade; Beaumont's wealth came from coal, while Carr's was a rich benefice in Exeter (which he rarely visited), and money from his aristocratic wife.
The point is, does the purchase of Angerstein's collection therefore mean that the National Gallery itself was founded on 'wealth derived from the slave trade'? I'm not sure it does, but what do you think? (Specifically, the money in question came from the repayment, by the Austrian government, of a war loan).
Or is the argument here that should we judge each painting on who owned it, and the means by which they earned, stole or borrowed the money to buy it? If so, should we be more concerned that this picture by Cranach in the National Gallery once belonged to Hitler?
Update - a reader writes:
I'm not sure the analogy to the Cranach allegedly owned by Hitler in the NG is entirely apposite. From what the NG says, it seems they were given misinformation at the time of purchase. Subsequent information which came to light suggests at least the possibility that it was looted as there appears to be a gap in the provenance between 1909 and 1945 when it was taken from a warehouse to USA. We should not be concerned therefore about whether it once belonged to Hitler but how how he acquired it.
The Angerstein collection was acquired in 1823, the same year that the Anti-slavery Society was founded. Although in 1772 it was held that no law in England supported slavery this did not apply outside England and Scotland. The attitude towards slavery appears to have been somewhat ambivalent in the early part of the 19th century. The Slave Trade Act of 1807 abolished the slave trade but not slavery itself. The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 finally abolished slavery but importantly provided for huge sums in compensation to the slave owners for loss of their assets which speaks volumes about the attitude of the the legislators. To-day one assumes the compensation would have been paid to the slaves and the owners locked up for false imprisonment. The point is that the purchase has to be looked at in the overall context of the time in which it occurred. From that perspective it seems to me that the purchase can hardly be viewed as objectionable.
