The Tate gallery in London has succeeded in raising £4.95m to keep a Turner watercolour, The Blue Rigi, in the country, it announced today.
The view of the Rigi mountain from Lake Lucerne in Switzerland at sunrise was sold to an anonymous foreign bidder for £5.8m last June - a record sum for a British work on paper. However the government temporarily suspended its sale to give the gallery time to raise the money to buy it.
Under British law, the culture department can impose a temporary ban on the export of a work considered to be a national treasure. Today, the gallery said it had raised the £4.95m purchase price set by the government ahead of March 20, the day the export bar was due to run out.
The money includes £1.95m from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, £2m from the Tate's trustees and £550,000 from more than 11,000 members of the public who responded enthusiastically to the gallery's "buy a brushstroke" appeal launched five weeks ago.
Commenting on the success of the public appeal David Barrie, director of The Art Fund, said: "We have been overwhelmed by the popularity of this appeal, both with the public and with our own members, who generously contributed 70% of the total raised in the past five weeks."
The Blue Rigi is one of four watercolors produced by JMW Turner after a visit to Switzerland in 1841, and features the artist's characteristically bold play of light and shadow. Tate director Nicholas Serota called the painting "a truly extraordinary work of ineffable beauty."
This year, the Tate failed in an attempt to obtain another painting in the series, The Dark Rigi: Lake of Lucerne, which remains in private ownership but is currently on show at Tate Britain, alongside its companion pieces, The Blue Rigi and The Red Rigi as part of the fundraising campaign.
Turner is considered one of Britain's greatest landscape painters. Last year, a Venice canal scene by the artist, Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio, sold for $35.8m (£18.2m) in New York - an auction record for a work by a British artist.