Gallery ‘overpaid £1.3m’ for work by female artist
The National spent £3.6m on a Gentileschi painting that had sold for £2m just months earlier
THE NATIONAL GALLERY has been accused of paying £1.3 million over the odds for the first painting by a woman that it has purchased in 25 years.
The London gallery, which was last year given more than £23 million in public funding, paid £3.6 million for the rare self-portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi. The gallery, which now owns 21 paintings by women out of a total of 2,300 works, announced its latest acquisition in July.
However, art historians have chastised the museum for overspending, after it bought the work from a mystery dealer just a few months after it had been available at a Paris auction with an estimate of €300,000-€400,000 .
The gallery did not bid on the painting at the auction in December. A spokesman said they had not been aware of its existence until days before the sale and had been unable to view it first-hand.
Instead, it was bought for just over £2 million by an anonymous dealer, who was quickly tracked down by the gallery, with specialists viewing the painting “shortly after the picture’s arrival in London”.
An agreed fee of £3.6 million was
The gallery now owns 21 paintings by women, out of a total of 2,300
reached, with funds coming from the National Gallery Trust and other donors including Hannah Rothschild, who in 2015 became the first woman to chair the gallery’s board of trustees.
Dr Bendor Grosvenor, an art critic who has appeared as an expert on the BBC’S Fake or Fortune, said: “We are always hearing how hard up UK museums are. So why pay the big mark up?
“The fact that they seem to have missed the picture’s sale in Paris is all the more surprising given the emphasis they placed, after the acquisition, on how securing paintings by female artists has been a priority, and that the acquisition of the self-portrait was a realisation of a ‘long-held dream’.
“We are also often told that major museums need time to buy artworks at auction, because the fundraising is so difficult. And yet, in this case, the great majority of the National Gallery’s funding to buy the picture came from what are effectively its own reserves.”
The gallery did not deny that it had overspent in a rush to acquire more art by women. The oil painting, dated 161517, depicts the artist as Saint Catherine of Alexandria in a rare and newly discovered self-portrait, which only came to light at a French auction last year.
Mr Grosvenor added: “There is a growing disconnect between some of our national museums and the public they serve. I’ve described before what I call the ‘Gollum syndrome’ when it comes to museums; it’s their ‘precious’. Their collection. Their museum. Their money. No. It’s ours.”