After making his fortune in the sugar business, Sir Henry felt he deserved to give something back to the nation. And so, the Tate gallery was born.
When Henry Tate, the 11th child of a Lancashire Unitarian minister, had success as a grocer, he branched out into the sugar business (by then less tainted by slavery, which had been abolished in 1833–34).
He introduced better refining techniques and embraced European methods to lump sugar into small cubes. Having made a fortune, Tate (1819–99) could have wielded much influence, but he had little interest in office and even less in fame; he donated generously, but quietly. He did, however, have one great passion: art.
Tate supported contemporary British artists — he was a personal friend of John Everett Millais — and his collection soon included some of the best paintings of the time, such as Millais’s Ophelia and John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott (top).
Sir Henry Tate. Image from The Business Encyclopedia and Legal Adviser, published 1920. Credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
All this Tate intended to leave as a bequest to the nation, but the National Gallery, which lacked space, turned it down. This prompted him to fund a new British-art museum, ‘as a thank-you offering for a prosperous career of sixty years’.
The notoriously modest Tate was offered a baronetcy twice and twice he declined it. The third time, the Marquess of Salisbury made a point of telling him that one more refusal would amount to an insult to Queen Victoria — so Tate duly accepted
When the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) opened it on July 21, 1897, Tate — a man who usually avoided public speaking at all costs — had words of praise for everyone else, from the curators (Sir William Agnew and Sir Edward Poynter) to the architect (Sidney Smith) and even the building contractors (Higgs and Hill), as well as the Prince: ‘Today, your Royal Highness puts the crown on the undertaking by graciously opening this gallery… and I venture to hope that the event… may be taken as a happy augury of its success.’
With that, the National Gallery of British Art was born — except it never really went by that name, becoming known as Tate Gallery.
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