It seems that hardly a week goes by without the threat of another great work of art leaving these shores. Certainly Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota must think so. Just as he announces, with palpable relief, that a private benefactor has stepped forward and promised £12.5 million to ‘save’ Sir Joshua Reynolds’s celebrated portrait of Omai from export (more of that later), the gallery may well feel obliged to embark on a new campaign to save yet another costly treasure.
This jewel is a recently discovered ‘lost’ portfolio of 19 highly finished and perfectly preserved William Blake watercolours, the original illustrations to Robert Blair’s poem ‘The Grave’, commissioned by the publisher Robert Cromek in 1805. According to the Blake specialist Martin Butlin, the portfolio is ‘arguably the most important Blake discovery since he began to be appreciated in the second half of the 19th century’.
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