Ashmolean raises £4.5m in nine months to keep Fra Angelico masterpiece in UK

Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum has announced that it has successfully raised almost £4.5m to bring Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion into public ownership for the first time. 

The 15^th-century Renaissance masterpiece, which has been in the UK for about two centuries, was sold to an overseas buyer and was at risk of leaving the country. 

Due to the work’s value and importance to the nation, the previous culture secretary put a temporary export license stop on the work in January 2024. The Ashmolean had nine months to express interest in acquiring the work and raise the necessary funds to keep the painting in the UK.

A private treaty sale enabled the museum to acquire the work for £4.48m, a substantial reduction in its market price. The painting will now go on free public display.

The acquisition was made possible thanks to lead donations from the Ashmolean’s chairman, Lord Lupton CBE, and David and Molly Lowell Borthwick; grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund, and The Headley Trust; more than 50 major donors; and a public appeal. 

Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar and one of the most celebrated artists of the Italian Renaissance, who is known in Italy today as Beato Angelico or “blessed angelic one”.

His paintings are characterised by their “extraordinary psychological penetration, compelling naturalism and distinctive colour palette of blue, pink-red and gold”, said the Ashmolean in a statement.

Painted in the 1420s, The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist and the Magdalen is one of Fra Angelico’s earliest works. Most of the artist’s paintings are large-scale frescoes or monumental altarpieces that remain in situ, making the Crucifixion one of his few surviving small-scale works on panel.

The hinged triptych, which depicts the Virgin and Child with angels and a Dominican saint flanked by Saints Peter and Paul, “offers extraordinary insight into both Fra Angelico’s innovative painterly style and the development of European painting more broadly”, said the Ashmolean.

There are very few paintings by Fra Angelico in British public collections and no others outside London – a fact that was noted by Arts Council England’s reviewing committee when considering the recommendation to bar the export licence.

The work is currently on display in the museum’s gallery of Early Italian Art but will be moved to hang alongside later work, allowing visitors to appreciate how the artist’s style developed over the course of his career and see “the extent to which his delicate, emotive approach was already established by the 1420s”.

The Ashmolean said the acquisition of the Crucifixion expands its preeminent collection of Italian renaissance art and will inspire a total rehang of those galleries, which have not been redisplayed since 2009.

The painting will also serve as a teaching resource for the University of Oxford’s History of Art and History Departments and its Department of Theology and Religion, as well as Blackfriars Hall, the Dominican community established in 1221, which is located next to the Ashmolean.

The statement said: “By keeping the Crucifixion in this country and by placing it on public view for the first time we will be able to demonstrate its significant contribution to the understanding of the Italian Renaissance and Fra Angelico’s oeuvre and ensure that future generations will have the opportunity to study the innovations of 15-century Florentine painting first hand.”

Xa Sturgis, the director of the Ashmolean, said: ‘Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion is a wonderful acquisition for the Ashmolean, building on and transforming our early Renaissance collection. I am thrilled that millions of visitors who come through our doors will now be able to enjoy this beautiful, moving and important work – the earliest surviving painting by the artist of a subject he was to return to again and again throughout his career. 

 “Raising close to £4.5m in six short months has been no easy task in the current climate, and I am immensely grateful to friends old and new who have helped us over the line with only days to spare.”   

Jennifer Sliwka, head of the Department of Western Art at the Ashmolean, said: “I am thrilled that Angelico’s Crucifixion will enter public ownership for the first time allowing Ashmolean visitors the opportunity to experience his painterly skills and ability to evoke profound emotional and psychological states first hand. 

“The idea that this innovative and beautiful work by one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance will continue to inspire and to move visitors to the museum for centuries to come fills me with joy and I am hugely grateful to the funding bodies and individuals who have made this possible for all our benefit.”