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A photograph of Benjamin Disraeli, an engraved portrait of William Wilberforce and a cartoon of Barbara Castle have all been misplaced by the UK parliamentary authorities, a freedom of information (FoI) request has revealed.
The Press Association has been given a list of more than 65 works of art that have been missing since 2024. They also include a photograph of Margaret Beckett, the UK’s first female foreign secretary and the first woman to lead Labour, and a satirical cartoon by Martin Rowson from the Conservative leadership battle of 1995.
A parliamentary spokesperson said it was a working collection, which meant that objects moved around frequently. None of the works had been permanently written off, they said.
The photograph of Disraeli, Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister, was taken by John Jabez Edwin Mayall. Mayall was a prolific Victorian portrait photographer who captured the images of many of the era’s best known figures.
Art UK, which catalogues Britain’s publicly owned art, lists 212 Mayall works in UK collections including portraits of Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the soprano Anna Bishop, the scientist Michael Faraday and the explorer David Livingstone.
Mayall also made a fortune photographing Victoria and the wider royal family with his carte de visite portraits feeding the 19th-century “cartomania” collecting craze.
The misplaced Disraeli photograph is likely to be the same as one in other collections, including the Royal Collection, showing a tired, heavy-lidded Disraeli in his 60s.
The missing print of Wilberforce, the most celebrated campaigner against the slave trade, was made by the printmaker William Holl and his brother Francis.
The Rowson cartoon is from the 1995 Tory leadership campaign when John Major resigned as party leader, telling opponents to “put up or shut up”. It shows Major seeking to lance the literal “boil” of the contest, as his deputy Michael Heseltine and challenger-apparent Michael Portillo look on.
Rowson said the issue of cartoons going missing was not uncommon. He said a cartoon of the Foreign Office Christmas party in 2004, sent to the then junior minister Denis MacShane at his department, “never got beyond reception”.
Rowson said: “It’s a shame but it’s hardly the crown jewels – and the point about cartoon originals is that they’ve been published already: the artefact is probably the impression in the newspaper, as that’s its ticket to posterity.
“The original is the modern equivalent to one of Hogarth or Gillray’s copper plates used to create the – reproduced – satirical print. That’s why we belong more properly to journalism than art.”
He said the misplaced work was “small beer compared to one of my cartoons which was part of a touring exhibition of work by members of the British Cartoonists’ Association, all of which were destroyed by a Nato airstrike in the Serbian public library it had reached on its British Council sponsored tour in 1998.”
The missing satirical cartoon of Barbara Castle depicts her as Florence Nightingale.
The number of works involved is much fewer than the 224 reported missing after a similar FoI request in 2018. At the time it included portraits of William Pitt the Younger, and a wartime oil painting by William John MacLeod of the scene after parliament was bombed.
A parliamentary spokesperson said: “There is little evidence of works of art going permanently missing from the Parliamentary Art Collection. As a working collection, artworks are frequently moved between their recorded locations and are often subsequently found, meaning none of the items currently recorded as missing have been written off or are considered a financial loss.
“Parliament continues to reduce the number of artworks recorded as missing through ongoing audits.”
They said five of the “missing” works had been found this year. The art collection is one of four parliamentary heritage collections, which contain 26,000 objects including furniture and decorative arts.
