Artworks including Disraeli portrait and Wilberforce engraving missing from Parliament
More than 65 artworks have been listed as missing from the Houses of Parliament since the start of 2024, according to parliamentary records released after a Freedom of Information request by the Press Association. The list includes a portrait photograph of Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria's favourite prime minister, and a 19th-century engraving of William Wilberforce, the leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade.
Also among the missing works are a photograph of Baroness Margaret Beckett, Britain's first female foreign secretary, and a satirical cartoon of Baroness Barbara Castle depicted as Florence Nightingale. The list includes a cartoon by Martin Rowson from the 1995 Conservative Party leadership election, showing John Major attempting to lance the literal "boil" of the contest while his deputy Michael Heseltine and challenger-apparent Michael Portillo look on.
The Disraeli photograph was taken by John Jabez Edwin Mayall, a prolific Victorian portrait photographer who captured images of many of the era's best-known figures. Art UK, which catalogues Britain's publicly owned art, lists 212 Mayall works in UK collections, including portraits of Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the soprano Anna Bishop, the scientist Michael Faraday and the explorer David Livingstone. Mayall made a fortune photographing Queen Victoria and the royal family with his carte de visite portraits, feeding the 19th-century "cartomania" collecting craze. The misplaced Disraeli photograph is likely to be the same as one in other collections, including the Royal Collection, showing a tired, heavy-lidded Disraeli in his 60s.
The missing engraving of Wilberforce was made by printmaker William Holl, with one report also crediting his brother Francis. The Rowson cartoon dates from the 1995 leadership contest, when John Major resigned as party leader and told opponents to "put up or shut up".
Parliamentary response and recovery
A parliamentary spokesperson said the collection was a working one, meaning artworks are frequently moved between their recorded locations and are often subsequently found. They said there was little evidence of works going permanently missing, and none of the items currently recorded as missing have been written off or are considered a financial loss. Five of the "missing" works have been found since the turn of the year, including one by 19th-century satirical cartoonist Isaac Cruikshank.
The number of missing works is vastly down on the 220 reported missing in 2018 after a similar audit, which included portraits of William Pitt the Younger and a wartime oil painting by William John MacLeod. One report puts the 2018 figure at 224. The Parliamentary Art Collection is one of four parliamentary heritage collections, containing 26,000 objects including furniture and decorative arts.
Reaction from Martin Rowson
Martin Rowson told the Press Association that the issue of cartoons going missing was not uncommon. He cited a Times cartoon of the Foreign Office Christmas party in 2004 sent to Denis MacShane that "never got beyond reception". "It's a shame but it's hardly the crown jewels," he said, "and the point about cartoon originals is that they've been published already: the artefact is probably the impression in the newspaper, as that's its ticket to posterity."
Rowson also compared the missing work to one of his cartoons that was part of a touring exhibition of work by members of the British Cartoonists' Association. All of those works were destroyed by a Nato airstrike in a Serbian public library, where they had reached on a British Council-sponsored tour in 1998. He described the lost parliamentary cartoon as "small beer" by comparison.