Sir Henry Tate
Introduction
Henry Tate was the Gallery's first benefactor. He donated his collection of British nineteenth-century art and provided funding for a building which was subsequently named the Tate Gallery.
An industrialist who had made his fortune as a sugar refiner, Henry Tate offered his collection of art to the nation on the condition that a gallery dedicated to British art was built.
The son of a clergyman, Tate was born in 1819 in Chorley, Lancashire and was educated in his father's own school until the age of 13 when he moved to Manchester to become a grocer's assistant. By the age of 20 he had his own shop and by 35 a chain of six shops, all in the Liverpool area.
Henry Tate and Sugar
In 1859 he became a partner in the John Wright & Co sugar refinery and by 1869 had gained complete control of the company and renamed it Henry Tate & Sons (later to become Tate & Lyle).
When Tate set up another refinery on the banks of the Thames near London, he left Liverpool and moved to Streatham in South London. By now he was a very successful, thanks largely to his patenting of a means of cutting sugar into dice-sized cubes. He used his fortune to endow colleges, hospitals and libraries, including that at Harris Manchester College, Oxford and, in 1893, free libraries for the London boroughs of Battersea, Brixton and Streatham.
Henry Tate and Art
At around this time, Henry Tate also began to collect art, most often from the Royal Academy's annual exhibitions. He was a great patron of Pre-Raphaelite artists, particularly his close friend John Everett Millais. To house his collection he had a picture gallery built at his house in Streatham that opened to the public on Sundays.
By the 1890s the extreme lack of space for British artists at the National Gallery was becoming a matter of national concern. Tate himself attempted to donate 60 paintings to the Gallery but the gift was declined by the trustees.
A campaign for funding was started with backing from The Times newspaper. The paper proclaimed that what London needed was a ‘really representative and choice collection of our (British) art gathered together in some great central gallery... a gallery that shall do for English art what Luxembourg does for French.’
Eventually a site was chosen for just such a gallery on the Thames at Millbank. Tate not only donated his own collection but also paid for the gallery to be built.
Shortly after the opening of the gallery in 1897, Tate was created a baronet. He died at Streatham on 6 December 1899.