Maria Balshaw
(Picture: Daniel Hambury: Stella Pictures)This week marks 125 years since the first Tate gallery — Tate Britain (known initially as The National Gallery of British Art) — opened on the marshy foundations of what had once been the largest prison in Europe. The then Chancellor of the Exchequer declared “a new palace of art will rise on the site of the old Millbank Penitentiary”!
A palace of art did indeed rise, at the bequest of Henry Tate. He was a quintessentially Victorian figure: a grocer from the north of England turned millionaire sugar magnate. He was a celebrated philanthropist in the fields of medicine and education as well as the arts, but his industry is impossible to separate from the legacies of slavery, even if Tate himself was born after the abolition of the British slave-trade.
