My Art News: Simon Sainsbury's £100m art gift to Tate and National Gallery

30/10/2007 Telegraph

The late Simon Sainsbury has bequeathed a treasure trove of paintings to the nation, writes Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent

In pictures: Sainsbury bequest

The greatest British art bequest in decades, which will see 18 masterpieces valued at up to £100 million divided between the National Gallery, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, was revealed yesterday.


	Lucian Freud's Boy Smoking: one of the 18 paintings bequeathed by Simon Sainsbury

The paintings, including two Monets, a Gauguin, three Lucian Freuds and a Francis Bacon, have been left to the nation by Simon Sainsbury, a scion of the supermarket family who died last October aged 76.

Sainsbury, with his two brothers - Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover and Sir Timothy Sainsbury, a former Conservative Trade ministe - paid for the £35m Sainsbury wing at the National Gallery in the 1990s.

Although Simon Sainsbury was the most private of the grocery dynasty - he refused honours and would not allow an entry in Who's Who - he was a major art collector and one of Britain's most generous philanthropists. He is estimated to have given away more than £100m during his lifetime.

With no children - he lived for 40 years with Stewart Grimshaw, a restaurateur and bookseller - Sainsbury offered the Tate and the National Galleries the pick of his collection 10 years ago and asked them to submit "wish lists". Several of the paintings have not been seen in public for years.

From Sainsbury, a great-grandson of the founder of the grocery chain, The National Gallery is to receive five pictures: two Monets, Snow Scene at Argenteuil (1875) and Water-Lilies, Setting Sun (about 1907); Paul Gaugin's Bowl of Fruit and Tankard before a Window (about 1890); Edgar Degas's After the Bath (about 1896); and Henri Rousseau's Portrait of Joseph Brummer (1909).

The two Tate galleries will receive 13 works; John Woootton's Life Size Horse with Huntsman Blowing a Horn (1732); Thomas Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Carter (1747-8); Johan Zoffany's Colonel Blair and his Family and Indian Ayah in an Interior (1789); two paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Nude in the Bath (1925) and The Yellow Boat (1936-8); Victor Pasmore's The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith No 1 (1944-7); three works by Balthus, The Snack (1940), Nude on a Chaise Longue (1950) and The Golden Fruit (1956); Francis Bacon's Study for a Portrait (1952); and three paintings by Lucian Freud, Girl with a Kitten (1947), Boy Smoking (1950-51) and The Painter's Mother (1972).

It is expected that other, unnamed works from Sainsbury's collection, will be sold at auction.

The bequest will be shown for the first time at Tate Britain next summer.

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, described the gift as "extraordinarily generous" and called it "one of the most important bequests to come to the nation in the last 100 years".

Top prices for artists

Below are the auction records for the artists named in the bequest list.

Claude Monet: £18.5m (2007) Snow Scene at Argenteuil, 1875

SAINSBURY BEQUEST