Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Four Weeks To Save Manet’s Portrait

The Ashmolean Museum is looking for an additional £595000 over the next four weeks to be able to purchase Manet's portrait of Mademoiselle Claus.  To help raise the profile of this campaign, which has reached 92% of it's goal, the Museum has placed 10 copies of the painting around Oxford with a hope of raising the final amount to keep this painting in the UK. If you would like to donate, please follow this link, and help keep this painting for the UK public.

There is a law in the UK that if a work of art of national importance is sold to an oversea's buyer, local museums or galleries have the right to buy it at 25% of it's current value to keep it in the country and on public display. The painting has been sold for £28million to an oversea's buyer, so this is why the Ashmolean is hoping to raise the remaining $£500000 of the nearly £7million needed to keep this painting in the UK.  

3 comments:

Petrea Burchard said...

What happens to the portrait if they don't raise the money?

Leeds daily photo said...

We have a strange system in this country where an object like this painting can be seen as a national treasure but if the owner wants to sell the government blocks it for a short time to allow those who might want to save it for the country to raise an equal sum of money. Strange, I cannot think that this would happen in France.

Petrea Burchard said...

I don't think it would happen in the States, either. But it's not a bad system.