Image: Fra Angelico Crucifixion (c) 2023 Christie's Images Ltd
Ashmolean Museum acquires 15th-century Fra Angelico ‘Crucifixion’ painting for £4.48m through private treaty sale.
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has this morning announced its success in raising nearly £5m to acquire a 1400s crucifixion painting.
Renaissance Master Fra Angelico’s ‘The Crucifixion’, which dates to the 1420s, had been barred from export since the beginning of the year, and was previously in a private British collection.
The museum had announced its intention to acquire the piece in September, having already raised £3.1m.
Today it announces the successful acquisition. A private treaty sale has enabled the Ashmolean to acquire the work for £4.48 million, which it said was a ‘substantial reduction in its market price’.
Now acquired, the painting will go on free public display for the benefit of visitors, students, scholars, and schoolchildren in perpetuity.
Dr Xa Sturgis CBE, 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 £4.5 million 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.”
The Crucifixion is one of the earliest surviving panel paintings by Fra Angelico and the earliest version of the subject he was to return to again and again throughout his career. It was discovered in a private UK collection and attributed to the master in the 1990s.
