Devil in the details of Archer’s tax saving

LORD ARCHER has reduced his tax bill by £48,000 by donating a statue of Satan to Oxford University.

The former Conservative MP and his wife, Dame Mary, made the donation through the Cultural Gifts Scheme. Launched in 2013, it allows people to receive a tax cut if they donate significant cultural works to the nation, rather than selling them.

The author, who has an estimated worth of £140million, gave the 80cm-tall bronze sculpture Satan/Me

phistopheles to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, where it has been on loan since 2010. Made by French artist JeanJacques Feuchère in the 1830s, it will form the centrepiece of its new 19th century gallery.

Matthew Winterbottom, curator of European art at the Ashmolean, said: “Feuchère’s Satan is one of the most forceful and expressive examples of brooding melancholy in Romantic art and is often seen as a precursor of Rodin’s Thinker.

“The Ashmolean is profoundly grateful to Lord and Lady Archer and to Arts Council England, for making this important work available to the Ashmolean.

“The sculpture will be displayed in one of the museum’s most popular galleries for the enjoyment of all of our visitors.”

A spokesman for the peer said he planned to leave works in his will to Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum as well as the Tate and the National Museum of Australia, in Canberra.