SIR Denis Mahon, art scholar and collector, continues to fight for public access to art, even though he is in his 87th year.
A member of the Mahon merchant banking family, he has just withdrawn an offer of three Italian Baroque paintings to the Walker Gallery in Liverpool because the gallery decided to introduce admission charges.
He has long been a stern critic of the British government for its "meanness" towards the arts, in particular the shrinking funds for public galleries and the resulting introduction of admission charges.
"I am fed up with the way everything is decided by accountants," said this scion of a banking family when he announced last December he was bequeathing his considerable collection to various galleries in Ireland, Britain and Italy.
He warned galleries in Britain which were to receive the paintings: "It is not too late to change my plans. All I have to do is leave a note to my Trustees ... and more of my paintings will go abroad after my death."
However, they did not have to wait for his death for this warning to become a reality. Yesterday he announced that the three paintings he had planned to give to the Walker Gallery would now join five others he had bequeathed to the National Gallery in Dublin, if it accepted them.
The National Gallery's board is likely to do so. Sir Denis has a long connection with Ireland in general, and with the National Gallery in particular.
His mother was Lady Alice Evelyn Browne, daughter of the fifth Marquess of Sligo, and was born at Westport House, Co Mayo. His father was John Fitzgerald Mahon, a baronet.
Sir Denis did not go into banking, but used the wealth it brought him to collect and study art. After attending Eton and Christ Church College, Oxford, he became a disciple of the Austrian refugee Nikolaus Pevsner, at the Courtauld Institute in London. Through him he developed an interest in the Italian painter Francesco Barbieri more commonly known as Guercino. He bought his first painting by him, Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph, in Paris in the 1930s.
This is one of the five paintings he bequeathed to the National Gallery last December, and another of Guercino's paintings is among the three he has just offered it.
Over the following 35 years he built up the largest private collection of Italian Baroque paintings in the world. He also collected works in the French classical tradition by artists such as Nicolas Poussin, and was involved in a dispute with Sir Anthony Blunt - Queen Elizabeth's art adviser later revealed as a spy - on the subject of Poussin. He is regarded as the foremost scholar on 17th-century Italian art, according to a spokeswoman for Ireland's National Gallery In 1993 he authenticated Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ, which had been discovered by the National Gallery's senior curator, Mr Sergio Beneditti, and shared the gallery's delight in the discovery.