Don't save the Blake 19

This early observation on the text can be applied with equal accuracy to Blake's drawings, which are (to quote myself) "histrionic and more than faintly ludicrous".

I could understand that some Scottish library or museum might, as an act of national piety, wish to own the only drawings ever inspired by the only poem by the minister of Athelstaneford, particularly as their publisher, Robert Cromek (though not a Scot), also played a significant role in the survival of Robert Burns's poetry, but that the Tate should now be considering their acquisition when they add nothing to our knowledge of Blake and have neither particular quality nor particular significance seems quite preposterous. The price is £8.8 million.

The minister has, of course, been advised by enthusiasts; they have told her that the survival of so large a group of drawings (19 of 20) is unique - and so it may be, but neither uniqueness nor survival is in itself a sound reason for buying anything, particularly when both are relative. Enthusiasts for
Blake are, however, as blinkered and anally retentive as enthusiasts for Turner, Constable, Stubbs and the few other grandees of British art.

Everything by any of these artists we, the British, hold in fetishist regard and are unwilling to let go. This response is primitive, as though we see our national virtue ebbing with the departure overseas of British works of art. Can no one in authority see that every time we behave as though every scrap of British art is sacred to our heritage, we contradict our right to keep the Elgin Marbles here?

With such behaviour we diminish the international status of British art. Look about you in the great galleries of other nations: British pictures in the Louvre are of dismal quality; in the Pinakoteks of Munich they are so weak that they disgrace the reputations of their painters; and can anyone recall a British painting in Berlin, Vienna, Madrid or Rome?

In Budapest there is a tiny sketch by Constable of singing quality, but in Essen the Constables are fakes. Only Stuttgart, with its brave purchase of Burn-Jones's Perseus Cycle, breaks the pattern of inadequacy and wretchedness, of the dull, the drab, the lifeless and even the utterly embarrassing.

Yet I constantly argue that were the British Council to mount an exhibition of the best of Stubbs, Wright of Derby, Reynolds, Raeburn, Ramsay, Gainsborough and early Lawrence, it would prove that in the 18th century we had painters who spoke loud and clear of Enlightenment and Reason, painters who in imagination, invention and sheer quality trounce most of their European peers and match the very best of them, Goya, Batoni and David.

I can think of no greater paintings to illustrate the spirit of that century than Stubbs's Whistlejacket and Wright's Lecture on the Orrery and Experiment with an Air Pump, no greater royal portrait than Lawrence's Queen Charlotte, but British painting is, because so little of it is to be seen in major European galleries, widely disregarded, if not held in the same contempt as Roger Fry expressed for it in 1934.

Only by letting more British paintings of high quality go to European galleries will this ever be remedied - but we make acquisition and export so difficult that in Paris, Berlin and Madrid they do not even think of buying them.

Blake's drawings for The Grave are far from great and the arguments for retaining them are specious and hysterical, but even if they were indeed great, we should let them go, for their destination in the US raises an additional important issue.

We deny export on the grounds that our heritage will be depleted, but we must, in the case of the US, ask whose heritage? Surely there must, between New York and San Francisco, be more people of British origin than remain in Britain herself ? Surely they are the owners of our heritage as much as we? Should we not seek to ensure that they, too, have access to the best of it?

The broader cultural argument must be that the minister should positively encourage the sale abroad of British art, let go the Constables and Turners of which we have so many thousands, and encourage our national galleries to supplement their collections by venturing far afield to buy and import foreign pictures.

Museums and galleries are justified much more by cultural exchange than by acting primarily as the protectors of a parochial heritage. Of course each nation should be the principal resource of its own culture and some, Denmark for example, are too small to share it; we, however, are not too small, yet we pursue a policy that, were it taken to its logical end, would give us a National Gallery of Constable and Turner, a Louvre of Claude and Poussin, a Prado of Velázquez and Zurbarán, and an Italian Renaissance that is the private purlieu only of Italians.

What we in particular need, and have needed for the past half-century, with an impoverished National Gallery as notable for its weaknesses as its strengths, and a Tate Modern remarkable for the ludicrous feebleness of its collections, is an active policy, not of retaining things British, but of buying when and where we can more things German, Spanish, French and Italian, more from the remoter and less-known areas of Europe, and more from America.

To our undying shame we let go in 1979, without demur, our one great example of the American Sublime. Painted in 1861, exhibited in London in 1863 with the widow of Sir John Franklin in attendance - for this was a picture perhaps in part inspired by the failure of his expedition to find the Northwest Passage and thus intimately tied to British history - it was bought by a Manchester tycoon and remained in his house for 116 years.

Let me ask one simple question: which would we rather have in the Tate Gallery, Blake's dreary drawings for The Grave at £8.8 million now, or The Icebergs by Frederic Church at £1.1 million a quarter of a century ago?