John Julius Angerstein 1732 January 1823 London merchant under writer patron fine arts collector paintings National Gallery
John Julius Angerstein (1732 – 22 January 1823), was a London merchant, Lloyd's under-writer, and patron of the fine arts. The imminent prospect that his collection of paintings was about to be sold by his estate, in 1824, galvanized the founding of the National Gallery, London. Angerstein was born in St Petersburg, Russia and settled in London in about 1749. It has wrongly been suggested that he was an illegitimate son of Catherine the Great or of Elizabeth, Empress of Russia. Family tradition holds that his true parents were Anna of Russia and the London merchant Andrew Poulett Thompson; his first position after arriving in London at the age of fifteen was in Thompson's counting house. In his role as a merchant he was said to own a third share in slave estates in Grenada, using profits from the slave trade to build up his art collection (and also benefiting from Lloyd's underwriting of the slave trade). Angerstein was chairman of Lloyd's from 1790 to 1796 and counted King George III, British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and artist Sir Thomas Lawrence among his friends. Although a slave owner, he was also on the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor an organisation with strong abolitionist connections. After a number of knife attacks on women by the so-called "London Monster", Angerstein promised a reward of £100 for capture of the perpetrator. Among his earliest art purchases was The Rape of the Sabines by Rubens; later acquisitions included works by Rembrandt, Velázquez, Titian, Raphael, Correggio and Hogarth, plus early drawings by Turner. From the break-up in London of the Orleans Collection he bought The Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo and several other works. His collection of paintings, consisting of about forty of the most exquisite specimens of the art, was purchased by the British government after his death, and formed the nucleus of the collection of the National Gallery.
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Photo credit: © SOTK2011 / Alamy / Afripics
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