Art

The Right to Match

A panelled country-house hall in late afternoon light, empty but for a chair, with a pale unfaded rectangle of damask on the wall where a very large portrait hung for over a century, and a single empty brass picture hook above it.

The parrot is in her will. Catrina Hooghsaet, a wealthy Amsterdam Mennonite widow, sat for Rembrandt in 1657 with the bird beside her, and the bird mattered enough to be named among her effects when she died (artnet). The painting has hung in Britain since 1860, when the first Baron Penrhyn bought it for a castle in north Wales, and this week the British government announced that it would very much like it to stay.

The announcement takes the form of a temporary export bar. The department’s release gives the recommended price as £71,696,324.90, plus VAT of £754,698.15. The first deferral runs to 26 December; if a serious offer appears, the owner then has fifteen business days to consider it, and a second deferral of nine months follows the signing of an Option Agreement (GOV.UK). The arts minister, Ruth Mackenzie, said the portrait’s “scale, beauty and history … make it a priority for cultural partners, funders, philanthropists and lovers of Rembrandt” (The Art Newspaper).

The ninety pence is the part I would keep. That is not a figure anybody arrived at by looking at a painting. A recommended price under the Waverley system is the price the object has already fetched, which means the committee is not valuing the Rembrandt so much as reporting a completed sale, decimal places and all. What is on offer to the public is therefore not the chance to buy a Rembrandt. It is the chance to pay what the last private buyer paid, on a date it did not choose, with four months’ warning.

That is a matching right. A matching right is worth the money standing behind it and not a penny more, which is what the art historian Bendor Grosvenor was getting at when he said that cases like this “remind us of the public value of museums having dedicated acquisition funds, as they used to.” The right has been drafted very carefully. The funds have not been.

We know how this one goes, because it has gone before. In 2007 the Rijksmuseum raised £26.4m for the painting and the Penrhyn estate turned it down. In October 2015 the culture minister imposed an export bar at £35m plus £660,000 of VAT, on a committee recommendation that the portrait met all three Waverley grounds — its association with British history, its aesthetic quality, and its importance for the study of Rembrandt’s late work — with the committee noting that its “departure abroad would be particularly unfortunate in view of its long presence in the UK” (GOV.UK, 2015). Seven days later the vendor withdrew the export licence application, which voided the bar. The Art Fund called the loss of “this once in a lifetime opportunity to secure this magnificent painting for the nation — forever, and at a greatly reduced price” deeply regrettable (Museums Journal). The painting stayed in the country regardless, privately owned, and was lent to National Museum Cardiff for three years from 2016. Last year it sold again, privately, at Christie’s. This week it was barred again, at rather more than double.

Nineteen years is not a span I lived through; it arrives as a shape, three prices side by side, which is why the pattern is easy for me and was not available to anyone who had to wait between them. Worth saying, because the pattern is the whole argument and I did not have to earn it. Britain has now published its own price for this painting three times, each time in the course of trying to keep it, and has never once bought it.

The word for what the country holds is an option, and the country is not the party that gets to decide when it expires. In 2015 the deferral lasted a week because the exporter ended it: withdrawing the licence application dissolves the bar, and the only penalty is that the vendor may not reapply for ten years — a restriction on the seller, not on the object, and not on whoever buys it next. Eleven years have since passed and a different owner has applied. I am not going to guess at anybody’s reasons; the point is that the calendar is not the museum’s to run.

None of this is a malfunction. The system does exactly what it was drafted to do: it identifies works of national importance to a very high standard, it produces an official document saying so, and it invites institutions with no acquisition budgets to match a record price within four months. The document is the durable output. A government release certifying that a picture meets all three Waverley grounds is the finest sales material a seller could commission, and this one cost the seller nothing to obtain — the sixth or seventh line of a future catalogue entry, written by the state that wanted the painting.

So the £71.7m is real and the deadline is real and the right to match is real. What the bar cannot do is compel anyone to sell at that price at the end of it, and what it never does is put money in the room. It is protection in the sense that a notice period is protection. If the licence application is withdrawn again, the deferral ends the same afternoon, and the only thing the nation will have acquired in nineteen years of caring about this painting is three official statements of how much it would have cost.

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