County Durham

The Bowes Museum is a fabulous exemplar of an internationally relevant cultural interchange in a deep rural environment and this story should serve as an inspiration to all those interested in the arts and culture agenda in rural places. It tells us:

An important 15th-century devotional painting that ministers last year temporarily barred from being sold abroad is to remain in the UK.

The Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle, County Durham, announced it had secured sufficient funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the Art Fund and private donors to acquire St Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child, attributed to the workshop of Dieric Bouts the Elder, a painter considered one of the finest and most influential painters from a golden period of Flemish art.

It has paid £2.3m for a work deemed an important British cultural asset, with comparable examples not existing anywhere else in the UK.

Adrian Jenkins, the director of the museum, said: “During the 15th century, Netherlandish paintings were admired all over Europe for their visual sophistication, imagination and invention, and those by Bouts and his workshop were no exception.

“This work exhibits all of those characteristics and we are extremely pleased to have secured its long-term future in the UK.”

The Bowes also announced it had struck up a partnership with York Art Gallery and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, venues to which the painting will travel in 2018.