BBC News Online: Entertainment: Arts

Historic items 'saved for nation'

Artworks are among the items saved

The government can save rare items "for the nation" by putting a bar on its removal from the country.

Often a museum or gallery will then step in and buy the item so that it can be kept on public display.

Arts minister Baroness Blackstone said: "It is a credit to the export deferral system that such important items have been saved for the nation.

"The objects cover a whole range of cultural artefacts from letters to prehistoric axe heads.

"What is common to all is that they will be publicly accessible providing people now and in the future with the opportunity to enjoy them."

The items include The Return from War, Mars disarmed by Venus by Rubens and Jan Brueghel and Guercino's painting Madonna of the Sparrow.

Letters by author George Eliot and letters by Samuel Coleridge have also been saved.

Other items include a rare Roman sculpture, three English wooden figures from the 15th Century, items of furniture and the personal archive of architect Charles Francis Annesley Voysey.