From The Art Newspaper, July 8:
The tapestry will be displayed at the British Museum from September 2026, as part of a bilateral season of culture between the UK and France
The Bayeux Tapestry will go on show at the British Museum in London next year after UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron of France agreed the historic loan. The display will mark the first time the precious tapestry, which depicts the 1066 Norman invasion and Battle of Hastings, has been in Britain in almost 1,000 years.
The tapestry will go on show in the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery of the British Museum between September 2026 and July 2027. In return, Sutton Hoo treasures and the Lewis chessmen, some of the British Museum’s most important objects, will be loaned to institutions in France.
The cultural partnership and exchange were announced today by Starmer and Macron, who is currently on a State visit to the UK, a move widely seen as re-setting UK-French relations following the tumultuous Brexit years. The loan will form part of a bilateral season of culture in 2027.
In a statement Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the British Museum, stressed how the new France-UK partnership reflects his strategy of working with other museums globally, based on lending or exchanging items. “This is exactly the kind of international partnership that I want us to champion and take part in: sharing the best of our collection as widely as possible and in return displaying global treasures never seen here before,” he said.
Cullinan adds: “The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most important and unique cultural artefacts in the world, which illustrates the deep ties between Britain and France and has fascinated people across geographies and generations. It is hard to overstate the significance of this extraordinary opportunity of displaying it at the British Museum.”....
....MUCH MORE
re: those deep ties, they came to mind in a 2022 post:
"French Groups Swoop For Depressed British Assets"
Apparently 1066 wasn't big enough in the cross-channel asset-grabbing biz..
In 2024 I explained part of my fascination with the tapestry
"Israeli hacktivist group brags it took down Iran's internet"
There's a lot of stuff going on in the world, isn't there? And sometimes it seems events are choreographed for our titillation and amusement.
Of course that comment could reflect either a semi-deep insight or a final psychotic break with reality on the part of yours truly.
This weekend we'll be pulling at different threads in the tapestry to see if we can reduce the seeming complexity of the embroidery to the underlying foundation mesh.
And what, possibly curious reader may wonder, led to this feeble excuse of an introduction?
I was contemplating whether I was going to be around to see the return of Halley's Comet which led to a 2021 post on the French-English Brexit fishing deal which used a panel of the Bayeux Tapestry as a graphic:
"France warns of 'reprisals' over Brexit fishing deal"
Huh. My first thought was to check the Bayeux Tapestry Museum to see if there are any analogs.
And, as a first pass guess, it looks like a no. Halley's comet isn't due until 2061 so the current reprisals probably won't be a re-enactment of 1066.*****On the tapestry the comet flies across the top as the people watch and point:
(segment 32 on the digitized panorama)
