John Julius Angerstein was a London businessman and Lloyd's underwriter, a patron of the fine arts and a collector. It was the prospect that his collection of paintings was about to be sold by his estate in 1824 that galvanised the founding of the British National Gallery.
Parentage
John Julius Angerstein was born in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1735 perhaps to a German Jewish family. It has wrongly been suggested that he was a natural son of empress Catherine II or of Elizabeth, Empress of Russia. Family tradition holds that his true parents were empress Anna of Russia and the London businessman, Andrew Poulett Thompson; his first position after arriving in London at the age of fifteen was in Thompson's counting-house.
Family
In 1771 Angerstein married Anna Crockett at St Peter-le-Poer, Old Broad Street. They had two children – Juliana, who married General :ru:Саблуков, Николай Александрович|Nikolai Sablukov of the Russian service, and John Angerstein . Anna died in 1783, and in 1785 John Julius Angerstein married Eliza Lucas. A portrait of Angerstein and his second wife, Eliza, by Thomas Lawrence was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1792.
Life and art collection
In his role as a merchant Angerstein was said to own a third share in slave estates in Grenada, using profits from the slave trade to build up his art collection. Angerstein was chairman of Lloyd's from 1790 to 1796 and counted king George III, British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and artist Sir Thomas Lawrence among his friends. Although a slave owner, he was also on the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, an organisation with strong abolitionist connections. , wearing "Van Dyck dress" in imitation of the 17th-century paintings of Anthony van Dyck. After a number of knife attacks on women by the so-called "London Monster", Angerstein promised a reward of £100 for capture of the perpetrator. Among his earliest art purchases was The Rape of the Sabines by Rubens. Later acquisitions included works by Rembrandt, Velázquez, Titian, Raphael, Correggio and Hogarth, plus early drawings by J.M.W. Turner. From the sale in London of the French Orleans Collection he bought The Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo and other works. After his death, thirty-eight of his finest paintings were bought by the British government for £60,000 to form the nucleus of the collection of the British National Gallery. Until the National Gallery was built in Trafalgar Square in London, the 38 works from Angerstein's collection were displayed in Angerstein's town house in Pall Mall. He lived for some years in Greenwich in south-east London, leasing a estate from Sir Gregory Page in 1774 and over the next two years building a house, Woodlands. This area is now known as Westcombe Park, part of a wide area on the north-eastern fringes of Blackheath that he sought to enclose in 1801. The house fell empty in 1870 when John's grandson William Angerstein relinquished the lease. In 1806 Angerstein served as Vice-president of the newly formed London Institution, and the previous year became a founding governor of the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom. As an active church-goer, he worshipped at St Alfege's Church, Greenwich, where he was also churchwarden.
Connections today
His family's connections with Greenwich are still commemorated. Angerstein Lane, near the heath at Blackheath, bears the family name. A public house, The Angerstein Hotel, is on Woolwich Road, Greenwich, close to the Woolwich Road flyover – on the opposite side of which lies the Angerstein Business Park. East of this is the Angerstein Railway Line, linking the peninsula at North Greenwich with the main railway network; as a result, an area of largely industrial land in between the lines, and to the east of the A102 road, is sometimes referred to as the "Angerstein Triangle."
