The one that didn’t get away

The sale of Holbein’s ‘Portrait of Christina, Duchess of Milan’ to Henry Clay Frick in 1909 – a painting that had been on long-term loan to the National Gallery in London from the Duke of Norfolk – and the painting’s eleventh-hour rescue, following a campaign by the National Art Collections Fund, became a national cause célèbre. Coming at a time of heightened sensitivities about the loss of Britain’s heritage and her declining importance as a world superpower, the threatened export of the painting provoked a huge outcry in the press, in which Frick, the Duke of Norfolk and the art dealers Colnaghi were cast in the role of villains in an Edwardian melodrama. However, new evidence presented in this article shows that the truth was considerably more complicated and prompts an examination of Edwardian debates about the protection of the national heritage.