A US hedge fund manager who paid more than £30m for a rare Florentine masterpiece has refused to sell it to the National Gallery because he would make a loss of more than $10m on the fall in the value of the pound.
“Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap”, painted in 1530, is one of only 15 surviving portraits by Pontormo, a Florentine painter of the Italian Mannerist School. The artist, whose real name was Jacopo Carrucci, shows the young aristocrat Carlo Neroni at the time of a siege of Florence and marks a stylistic turning point in Florentine painting.
Two years ago the painting was sold to James Tomilson Hill III, president and chief executive of Blackstone Alternative Asset Management, for £30.6m by the Earl of Caledon.
Thought lost for 200 years, the painting had been kept at the family estate until 2008, when it was rediscovered by the Christie’s Old Master expert Francis Russell. It was soon after put on temporary display at the National Gallery.
After Mr Hill bought the painting in 2015, the government put a temporary export bar on the work to give a UK buyer the chance to save it for the nation.
Sir Hayden Phillips, the chairman of the committee of experts that recommended deferring the export licence, described the painting as “stunning”. “It bowled me over by its striking beauty,” he said.
Last summer the Treasury offered the National Gallery an unusual tax concession of £19m if it could match the bid. Others who stepped in to fill the remaining £12m gap included the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art Fund, a fundraising charity.
But then the Brexit vote triggered a sharp decline in sterling. A spokesman for Mr Hill said the fall in the value of the pound since his purchase meant accepting the National Gallery offer would leave him with a loss of more than $10m.
“Mr Hill has declined to accept the National Gallery’s offer to purchase the Pontormo, given the offer would have resulted in a material loss,” his spokesman said. The gallery is understood to have made a second improved offer, which still fell substantially short of the original dollar price paid by Mr Hill. The National Gallery declined to comment.
Mr Hill’s refusal means that under the rules he cannot export the painting from the UK or apply for another export licence for the work for 10 years.
The hedge fund chief was willing to lend the work to institutions in the US and Europe, the spokesman said. The National Gallery confirmed it had “no plans” to take the work on loan, however.
Bendor Grosvenor, an art historian, was sympathetic to Mr Hill’s “dilemma”, questioning why he should be “compelled to accept a $10m loss”.
But he said the case was likely to bring renewed calls for reform of the export licence system for art works. “Clearly, we cannot have a situation where museums and bodies like the Art Fund spend months heroically raising money, for it to all be in vain.”
Mr Hill has been a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 2012. A collector of both modern art and Old Masters, he has lent works in his collection to the Met and served on the visiting committee for the museum’s European paintings department.
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