Some of the most remarkable objects in Britain's public collections arrived there not by purchase but through the tax system. Collected, announced on 23 October 2026, will be the first exhibition devoted to works acquired for the nation through the Acceptance in Lieu and Cultural Gifts schemes. It opens at the National Gallery in London on 22 May 2027, running until 5 September, before touring to Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff through 2028 and into 2029.

The London display gathers around forty works, spanning centuries and showing the range of what the schemes have rescued. They include Picasso's Weeping Woman of 1937, on loan from Tate, Lucian Freud's Portrait of Hermione Scott, Magritte's La condition humaine and a group of Picasso ceramics. The most recently made work is Peter Doig's At the Edge of Town, painted in 1986 to 1988. Among the curiosities are a Chinese porcelain jardiniere from about 1730, once owned by Horace Walpole and famous as the vessel in which his cat Selima drowned, and the Hamilton-Rothschild Tazza, a large Byzantine cup of sardonyx, gold and enamel assembled across a thousand years.

The two schemes work in different ways. Acceptance in Lieu allows people facing an inheritance tax bill to settle it by transferring an object of national importance to the state, while the Cultural Gifts Scheme, launched in 2013, rewards lifetime donations with a reduction in income, corporation or capital gains tax. Both are administered by Arts Council England on behalf of the government, and over the decades thousands of objects have passed free of charge into museums, galleries, libraries and archives across the country.

Curator Daniel Sobrino Ralston describes the show as a celebration of the cultural riches that have entered public ownership through these initiatives. A core group of eight paintings, including works by Corot, Cézanne, Sargent, Max Ernst and Ruisdael, will travel to all four venues, with each host adding pieces from its own holdings. In Edinburgh the exhibition will be woven into the permanent displays from June 2028, while Belfast and Cardiff will present their versions later that year and in spring 2029.