Botticelli's £10.2m Virgin and Child Goes on View at Oxford's Ashmolean

Sandro Botticelli's The Virgin and Child Enthroned (1470s), valued at £10.2m and blocked from leaving the UK earlier this year, has gone on display at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford — the same venue that first exhibited it in 1934–35.

The London-based Klesch Collection bought the painting and announced in May a three-year loan to the Ashmolean. Back in the 1930s, the museum showed the work when it was still attributed to Botticelli's workshop. Its return marks the first time Oxford audiences can see it as a fully credited Botticelli.

Why was the painting stopped from leaving?

The UK government placed an export bar on the work in May 2025. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport set a recommended price of £9,960,000, plus VAT of £272,000 — a sum that an eligible institution can reclaim. The painting had sold at Sotheby's London in late 2024 for £9.7m with fees.

An export bar (a temporary government block on a work leaving the country) gives UK buyers a window to match the price and keep the artwork on public soil. In this case, the private Klesch Collection stepped in and chose to keep the painting accessible through a long museum loan rather than a gallery wall at home.

What did conservation reveal?

The painting underwent conservation over the summer. Conservators removed discoloured varnish and later retouching, revealing well-preserved details of the Virgin and Child and restoring the original cooler tones, according to an Ashmolean statement.

The work is also unusual for its generous use of gold leaf. "Although earlier Italian painters regularly applied gold to the backgrounds of their devotional works, it was less widely used by Botticelli's time," the statement adds. The gold ground makes the panel a late survivor of a medieval convention that Botticelli's generation had largely abandoned.

Where has the painting been for two centuries?

The panel's provenance reads like a small history of displaced devotional art.

• Housed in the Convent of San Giuliano in Florence in the early 19th century.
• Later moved to a small chapel attached to a group of farmhouses in a nearby village.
• Passed to the family of Giovanni Magherini Graziani, who sold it in November 1903 to the Italian dealer Elia Volpi.
• Bought in May 1904 for £5,000 by Harriet Sarah Jones Loyd (Lady Wantage).
• Kept at Betterton House, near Wantage, Berkshire, since 1944.

Who are the new owners?

Founders A. Gary and Dr. Anita Klesch started the Klesch Collection in 2014 with the acquisition of a set of Four Seasons by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The collection spans 15th-to-17th-century European art and includes works by Caravaggio, Sofonisba Anguissola and Rubens. It lends regularly to museums and institutions worldwide — which is why the Botticelli landed at the Ashmolean rather than in storage.

What does this change for the public? For three years, a painting that spent eight decades in private hands at Betterton House is now free to see in Oxford, freshly cleaned and fully attributed. The loan sets a template the UK government will likely welcome: private capital stepping in where institutions can't, then sharing the result.