National Gallery's Raphael gamble pays off

The heritage lottery fund today granted the National Gallery £11.5m toward the cost of Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks, making it almost certain that the painting will not leave Britain.

A gamble by the gallery that a lower bid for the painting would increase the likelihood of raising the necessary funds seems to have paid off.

The gallery had originally asked the fund for £20m to buy the painting from the estate of the Duke of Northumberland. The sum would have been more than double the highest previous grant from the fund for a work of art.

Earlier this week, however, it was announced that the gallery had slashed by a third the amount it was offering to stop the picture going to the J Paul Getty Museum in California, and that it would only request between £11m and £12m from the fund.

On top of this, the gallery is confident that it can raise another £9.5m, betting that £21m - after tortuous calculations involving taxes and art market inflation - will be judged a matching bid for the £29m which the Duke of Northumberland would get from the Getty.

The duke, whose family has owned the painting since the mid-19th century, has said he needs to sell the painting to fund restoration work at his family home, Alnwick Castle. The National Gallery has held the painting on long-term loan since 1991.

At a press conference in London today the heritage lottery fund said the cash should ensure that the painting becomes part of the National Gallery's permanent collection where it will be displayed with eight other works by Raphael.

Liz Forgan, chair of the fund, said: "This was a once-and-for-all opportunity to keep the Madonna in Britain and strengthen a great national collection. An opportunity we felt could not be missed.

"It is difficult to weigh up the public benefit of an old master picture against a wildflower meadow or a vintage steam engine, but the national lottery is the only real source of funding for much of the UK's heritage."

The Madonna of the Pinks is considered to be one of the freshest and most cherished small images of the Madonna and the Christ child from the Italian renaissance. It is thought to have been completed in Florence in about 1507-8 just before Raphael left to start work in Rome. Startlingly, for its time, it openly portrays the tender emotions of mother and child.