Masterpieces by such artists as John Constable, Sir Henry Raeburn, Van Dyck and Barbara Hepworth do not come on the open market very often, and when they do, it is usually beyond the financial means of our public galleries to buy them in competition with well-heeled collectors from around the world.

Masterpieces by such artists as John Constable, Sir Henry Raeburn, Van Dyck and Barbara Hepworth do not come on the open market very often, and when they do, it is usually beyond the financial means of our public galleries to buy them in competition with well-heeled collectors from around the world. And yet they now hang in the National Galleries of Scotland, due to a very cultural wrinkle in the UK's otherwise prosaic tax laws.

Perhaps a tip of the hat is worth giving to the Acceptance in Lieu scheme. Managed not in Scotland but through the Arts Council of England, the scheme enables those due a hefty amount of inheritance tax, to offset some or all of what is due by donating valuable art to the nation. In its present guise, it was instituted by the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, after the People's Budget of 1909.

If these works of art could not be donated to public galleries across the UK, they would likely be sold at auction, and lost to the public gaze, and even to these islands completely.

Today, a fine Raeburn portrait is now, for the first time, available permanently to the Scottish public, the result of this practical and, at the same time, enlightened, fiscal arrangement.