The Royal Bank of Scotland is to open one of the largest collections of British art in private hands to the public after it was accused of hiding its collection in its corporate offices and vaults.
RBS, which is 70% owned by the taxpayer, has revealed that it owns more than 2,200 pieces of British art, including work by LS Lowry, David Hockney, Patrick Caulfield and Sir William McTaggart, and rare 18th-century works by Johann Zoffany and Joshua Reynolds, displayed in its offices and branches.
Experts believe it is the largest corporate art collection in Britain, and worth millions of pounds, as it includes a significant group of postwar and contemporary British paintings and prints collected by the NatWest before the banks merged in 2000.
But RBS last exhibited work in 2003, when 40 paintings by Scottish artists were shown at Manchester's Lowry gallery. It only once allowed a full range of paintings from the newly merged collection to be exhibited, at the City Arts Centre in Edinburgh in 2001, when it also put on a short tour of contemporary art to Sheffield, Newcastle and York.
The bank no longer has an art curator on its staff and has confirmed it has sold work from the 1,400 pieces inherited from NatWest, including one of the most valuable, by the painter Frank Auerbach. It has also sold a major painting by the Scottish colourist Samuel Peploe, of Tantallon castle near Edinburgh.
An investigation by the Guardian has established RBS has 300 pieces in storage and only one is currently on long-term loan, to the Ulster Bank in Dublin, despite claims that it regularly lends work to galleries and museums. Supported by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, public and corporate art charities have put pressure on RBS to share its collection after it was saved from collapse with a £20bn bailout from the Treasury, leaving it 70% owned by the taxpayer.
RBS has told the Guardian it broadly agrees with its critics that it now has a public duty to share its collection and is in discussions with museums and arts experts, including the National Galleries of Scotland, which runs five galleries in Edinburgh, about possible loans and exhibitions.
"We are determined to fulfil the responsibilities that come with the support we have been privileged to receive and that come with our wider position in society. To that end we are actively engaged in discussions around the art collection and considering options for sharing this more widely than we have in the past," a spokeswoman said.
Colin Tweedy, the chairman of Arts & Business, an influential charity which promotes culture and the arts in business, said the bank's silence about the collection and its failure to show it publicly had been frustrating and worrying.
"I can understand their embarrassment, but the difficulty is that the collection seemed to have disappeared," he said. "I was worried it had been thrown away and damaged. My view is that this is something they should be proud of, instead of being embarrassed."
He added: "It is not only a public duty but also a business opportunity, because people will see some wonderful British work and realise it is owned by RBS."
The bank should consider lending some of its lesser works to schools, hospitals and care homes, as well as to galleries and museums. "This is a great opportunity for the bank," Tweedy said. "I'm delighted to find that it has reappeared."
Andrew Ellis, director of the Public Catalogue Foundation, a charity that is photographing and listing 200,000 paintings in publicly owned collections, is to invite RBS to join the foundation's programme. That includes a new joint venture with the BBC to put images of its paintings on the internet.
"It would be a fantastic opportunity to democratise the collection, and what an amazing showcase to the world," he said. The RBS collection was important because public galleries had been largely unable to afford modern British work during the past 15 years.
"Any corporate collection has a responsibility to ensure that its works are shown to its staff and that maximum opportunities are taken to show the work to the public. That is doubly the case for a corporation which has fallen into public ownership," he said.
The department of culture urged RBS to put its works on show: "We want the British public to have access to great works of art, whether they are in public or privately owned collections. We would encourage any business which owns a corporate art collection to enable it to be seen by the public where practicable."
The bank is still resisting pressure to disclose the value of its collection, which has dropped due to the recession, or publish a full list of work it owns. The bank also owns hundreds of lesser works of art, mainly prints, worth less than £500.
It said its advisers had said it has only about 10 pieces of "national museum quality", including work by McTaggart, LS Lowry and Johann Zoffany, whose 1766 portrait of the banker Andrew Drummond is one of the most valuable the bank owns. It has another 40 of "historical importance", a spokeswoman said.
But these figures are contested by informed sources, who believe RBS has downplayed the significance of its modern British works. A number of contemporary paintings from the NatWest collection have been valued at six-figure sums, including pieces by Gillian Ayres and Albert Irvin, who made two paintings in the same series which were bought by the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
Art world sources said RBS stopped showing its work in public after a clash of cultures following the merger with NatWest. In the five years before RBS collapsed, senior bank executives lost interest in supporting British art and used its collection to brighten up its offices. "It was for decoration. NatWest had a much more expansive, forward-looking attitude," said one senior source.
Corporate collection
Created by the marriage of the Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest in 2000, Britain's largest corporate art collection has taken 250 years to create and helps tell the story of British banking. RBS brought a provincial collection of mainly Scottish painters to the union, including portraits of founding fathers such as Andrew Drummond and "genre" works such as topographic views of Edinburgh, one dating to 1550, and Scottish landscapes. Under Sir Michael Herries' chairmanship in the 1980s, RBS bought work by modern artists including Peter Howson, Terry Frost and Joan Eardley, but critics believe the NatWest collection was the most exciting. It had historic paintings: NatWest includes the Queen's bank Coutts, and traces its roots to 1650. Under Lord Alexander in the 1990s, NatWest sponsored a £26,000 contemporary art prize, opened the Lothbury gallery at its London HQ, employed a curator and built up a collection of 1,400 mainly postwar pieces, including work by Frank Auerbach, Callum Innes, David Hockney and Gillian Ayres.