The artist Joseph Mallord William Turner is to appear on the new £20 note, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney announced on Friday.
The new design is to include Turner’s self-portrait and his 1838 oil painting The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up.
“Turner is perhaps the single most influential British artist of all time,” Carney said. “His work was transformative, bridging the classical and modern worlds. His influence spanned his lifetime and is still apparent today.”
Photo: Reuters
Carney made the announcement as he unveiled a concept image of the note at the Turner Contemporary art gallery in the southeast English seaside resort of Margate.
“Turner bequeathed this painting to the nation, an example of his important contribution to British society,” Carney said.
Turner was selected by Britain’s central bank following nominations from the public.
The current £20 note, first issued in 2007, carries a picture of 18th-century economist Adam Smith.
Alex Farquharson, director of London’s Tate Britain gallery, said: “Turner’s popularity is unrivaled — he was voted the nation’s favorite artist last year — and now everyone can celebrate Turner’s great contribution to art on a daily basis.”
The new £20 note, which is to enter circulation by 2020, would be the third in a series of banknotes printed for the first time on polymer rather than paper.
A new polymer five-pound note featuring World War II prime minister Winston Churchill is to be unveiled on June 2 and enter circulation in September.
A £10 note on polymer featuring novelist Jane Austen is to be issued next year.
Sterling is the first of the world’s most traded currencies — ahead of the US dollar, the euro and the yen — to switch to polymer.
In the US, the one-time slave turned abolitionist Harriet Tubman was on Wednesday named as the new face of the US$20 banknote, the first time an African American has featured on US currency.
A sweeping redesign of the US bills to be unveiled in four years would also protect Alexander Hamilton’s central place on the US$10 note, once thought threatened until Broadway’s hit hip-hop musical Hamilton made the 18th-century US finance chief a modern-day star.
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has appointed Rose Castanares, executive vice president of TSMC Arizona, as president of the subsidiary, which is responsible for carrying out massive investments by the Taiwanese tech giant in the US state, the company said in a statement yesterday. Castanares will succeed Brian Harrison as president of the Arizona subsidiary on Oct. 1 after the incumbent president steps down from the position with a transfer to the Arizona CEO office to serve as an advisor to TSMC Arizona’s chairman, the statement said. According to TSMC, Harrison is scheduled to retire on Dec. 31. Castanares joined TSMC in
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the