My Skin and The Du Cane Boehm Family Group 1734-2000

Emerging social elites seem to find it necessary to justify their "natural" right to wealth and privilege. This is done in many ways. The one that interests Mongrel here is the use of aesthetics to negotiate the social positions of new economic forces. Sir Henry Tate himself directly convinced Harcourt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to help out with funds to build the Tate in order to circumvent the established aesthetic orthodoxy of the time. From its beginning, the Tate has supported the taste values of whichever social elite was contemporarily emerging.