Public gifts help save the Armada Portrait
THE Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I has been saved for the nation after thousands of members of the public helped to raise £10 million to prevent it being sold abroad.
The painting, once owned by Sir Francis Drake, has now been acquired for the public art collection after his descendants chose to sell it.
After an appeal from the Art Fund and Royal Museums Greenwich, more than 8,000 members of the public contributed £1.5 million.
Today, the fund will announce this generosity has inspired a major grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, which will donate £7.4 million to secure the work.
A total of £10.3 million raised, which includes contributions from the Linbury Trust, the Garfield Weston Foundation and the Headley Trust, is enough to bring the painting into public ownership for the first time in its 425-year history.
It will go on display late this year at the Queen’s House, on the site of Elizabeth I’s birthplace at the original Greenwich Palace.
The Art Fund hailed the “extraordinary level of support from the public” which made the appeal “one of the most successful ever campaigns for a work of art”.
The life-sized portrait commemorates the failed invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1588, and it one of the most famous images of British history.
Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, said: “This campaign has been a triumph of popular will.”