Scotland’s national galleries are to launch a £4m fundraising campaign to buy the famous painting Monarch of the Glen, after brokering a knockdown price with its current owner, Diageo.
The multinational drinks company, which has owned the work by Sir Edwin Landseer for decades, has agreed to gift half the painting’s estimated value of £8m after initially planning to sell it on the open market to the highest bidder.
The Monarch of the Glen, which was painted in 1851 and depicts a royal stag – one with 12 points on its antlers – standing in a mist-hung Highland glen, is one of the most recognisable and widely reproduced “Scottish” paintings.
For its admirers, it has come to exemplify the romance, natural beauty and nobility of the Highlands, yet Landseer was English and it was commissioned for the House of Lords in London.
It had been due to be auctioned at Christie’s next month with a potential price of £10m or more. Bidding was expected to be fierce, raising the strong chance the piece would end up in a private collection overseas unless the government placed a temporary export bar on it to allow a British buyer to come forward.
The deal will instead bring the piece into public ownership for the first time, and allow the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) to put the painting on permanent display. It has been on long-term loan from Diageo for the past 17 years to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Sir John Leighton, the director general of NGS, said he was delighted by Diageo’s “grand gesture”.
“It offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for this major work to be acquired for the nation,” Leighton said. “The Monarch of the Glen is an iconic image which is famous across the world. The ideal home for such an important and resonant picture is the Scottish National Gallery where it can be enjoyed and admired by millions of visitors in the context of the nation’s unrivalled collection of Scottish, British and European art.”
The piece ended up in the hands of Diageo, the biggest producer of scotch whisky and one of the world’s largest drinks companies, following a series of mergers. It had been a trademark for Dewar’s and then Glenfiddich whiskies.
The oil painting had been on display in London in an exhibition celebrating Christie’s 250th anniversary: the auction house had first sold it 100 years ago, the last time in its 160 years in private and corporate hands that it had gone on the open market. Christie’s has supported the new deal to hand it to the NGS.
When the proposed auction was announced earlier this month, Peter Brown, Christie’s international head of Victorian and pre-Raphaelite art, described the artwork as “one of the greatest pictures of the 19th century and known worldwide”.
“Yes, of course it has a universal currency in that it has been so widely reproduced,” he said. “But it is an extraordinarily masterful piece of painting … the brushwork is superb, the way the mist parts round the beast, the dew on the antlers, the realisation of fur, the way the heather sparkles in the morning light.
“There is an incredible sense of command and destiny there and it is those qualities that lift it out of the ordinary and make it so beloved.”
