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.
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