Devil in the details of £48,000 tax saving for Archer

LORD ARCHER has reduced his tax bill by £48,000 by donating a statue of Satan to Oxford University.

The former Conservative MP and his wife, Dame Mary, made the donation through the Cultural Gifts Scheme. Launched in 2013, it allows people to receive a tax cut if they donate significant cultural works to the nation, rather than selling them.

The author, who has an estimated worth of £140million, gave the 80cm-tall bronze sculpture

to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, where it has been on loan since 2010. Made by French artist Jean-Jacques Feuchère in the 1830s, it will form the centrepiece of its new 19th century gallery.

Matthew Winterbottom, curator of European art at the Ashmolean, said: “Feuchère’s is one of the most forceful and expressive examples of brooding melancholy in Romantic art and is often seen as a precursor of Rodin’s

“The Ashmolean is profoundly grateful to Lord and Lady Archer and to Arts Council England, for making this important work available to the Ashmolean.”