Can we get our Turners back? British plea to the US raiders of our lost art

America has many of the best Turners, according to Amy Con­cannon, who is curating the 250th birthday celebrations for JMW Turner at Tate Britain, where the great artist’s archive of notebooks has just gone on display for the first time.

Britain does have iconic Turners, but “America has the most outside Britain  – and a few rarely-lent gems,” she said. “Turner was really esteemed there, so wealthy visitors took them home.”

Some of the superstar Turner paintings in the US, including the 1835 Tyneside scene Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, will arrive for a major show later this year.

And their arrival flips the script on a familiar cultural debate: amid the unending diplomatic row over demands for the British Museum to send back the Parthenon marbles, calls are growing for a fresh look at the basis on which key UK artefacts are held abroad.

It’s not that Britain is short of Turners – Tate alone has more than 100– but Newcastle’s Laing Art Gallery, which has no Turner oils, would clearly like it if the “Geordie Turner” were sent back from Washington DC.

Among the lost treasures is the Falls of Clyde, a ship docked in Honolulu and the subject of a long campaign to restore it to Glasgow. There’s also a glut of Shakespeare first folios in Washington’s Folger library and the Bayeux tapestry in Normandy, probably made in Britain. And then there’s Winnie the Pooh. The original teddy bear that inspired AA Milne’s stories currently sits alongside Eeyore and Piglet in the New York Public Library – a long way from the Ashdown Forest, original of Hundred Acre Wood, East Sussex.

In 1998 the late politician Gwyneth Dunwoody asked prime minister Tony Blair to raise the issue with Bill Clinton: “Just like the Greeks want their Elgin marbles back,” she said, “so we want our Winnie the Pooh back.” The real-life Christopher Robin, son of author AA Milne, had in 1947 given it to a US publisher who then donated it to the city library.

Clive Farahar, an antiquarian book expert, said: “If you read Christopher Robin’s biography it’s clear he wanted the bear to just go away. It’s a strange place for it to end up though.”

Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria & Albert museum, would have liked the original bear in his 2017 show about Pooh, but he thinks it is “quite salutary” for UK visitors to encounter pieces of their culture abroad. “It reminds us how citizens from all over the world feel about our history and culture,” he said. The key period of loss for Britain was the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he explains, “when American robber barons perfectly legally hoovered up interiors and paintings”.

As Britain starts to make amends for a history of plunder, Hunt sees cause for pride. “Our state, happily, has a good track record of lending important works of art, so it would have to be a very specific set of circumstances for me to argue that something should be returned to us for good. Only, say, if it was something recently stolen, or taken in the Holocaust. Loans and partnerships are important now, with the rising tide of chauvinism,” he says.

Photograph Art Images via Getty Images