Exhibitions celebrating the nation’s art treasures have a habit of backfiring. Within 50 years of the great Art Treasures of the United Kingdom show held in Manchester in 1857, for instance, around half the works of art exhibited in this inadvertent shop window had been sold by their owners and had left the country. What strapped-for-cash country landowner, hit by the agricultural depression of the 1880s, could resist the newly bulging chequebooks of the German museums and the equally bulging American plutocrats? Not least when a loan to an exhibition had proved to the family that it could, after all, live without its greatest heirloom. As the heritage Jeremiahs warned at the time of the comparably spectacular Treasure Houses of Britain show in Washington in 1985, human nature and financial expediency have not changed a bit.
What has changed over the intervening years is Britain’s ability to respond quickly and effectively to the threat of any masterpiece — major or minor — leaving these shores.
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