MCC into bat to buy painting proving ‘Englishness of cricket’
THE Marylebone Cricket Club could buy a painting which is the subject of a row about the Englishness of cricket in order to keep the artwork in the UK. Painted by Benjamin West in 1763, The Cricketers was due to be sold abroad until ministers blocked the sale, deeming the work nationally significant as “one of the most important paintings” of the gentleman’s game.
The artwork’s owner has fought to have the £1.2million painting shipped, arguing that its link to cricket is not a good enough reason to keep it in the UK. Now, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) could bring the row to an end.
The club based at Lord’s is keeping an eye on the painting, it is understood, and could try to buy the 260-year-old work. A spokesman for the MCC, which has a museum opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1953, said the club will “continue to monitor the situation”.
The fate of The Cricketers, which shows friends chatting while one leans on a cricket bat, is to be decided this year, with the US a possible destination if it is not secured by a British buyer.
Stuart Andrew, an arts minister, initially tried to prevent it leaving by imposing a temporary export bar, after an advisory committee deemed the painting “one of the most important paintings pertaining to early cricket, painted at a critical period in the development of the game”.
The Cricketers was created by American-born artist West, who also depicted the deaths of British heroes General Wolfe and Admiral Lord Nelson. It was commissioned by William Allen, a wealthy figure in colonial Pennsylvania who opposed the American revolution. The men depicted are his sons and their friends during their education in the “mother country”.
It is understood the painting may be owned by a descendent of the loyalist Allen family, now based in the UK, who arranged to sell the work in 2021 to an international buyer.
Experts on a Department for Digital Culture Media Sport reviewing committee, which advises on art exports, said the work was an early portrayal of cricket as a “noble sport” carrying “notions of gentility”, making it an important depiction of the development “from a rustic sport” to one “taken up in earnest by aristocratic patrons”. However, the owner trying to sell the work has claimed that it has much more cultural significance for Americans. The submission claimed that its “significance to the history and national life of the UK” is confined to the fact it was painted in Britain and depicts “equipment associated with cricket”.
The reviewing committee maintained that “even if the cricket equipment was included as props, rather than as a painting of a game, their presence was intentional as symbolic of status and British nationalism”.
A decision on the painting’s future will be made this year, it is understood.