On Tuesday, the Tobacco and Vapes Bill – intended to prevent British children from ever legally being able to smoke – started its journey through UK Parliament. If passed, it will give the country some of the toughest anti-smoking measures in the world. Take a brisk 30-minute stroll north through Covent Garden to the British Museum, though, and you’ll find tobacco is viewed in a different light.
It turns out the museum has acquired almost 2,500 Japanese art objects to date with funding from Japan Tobacco International (JTI), which owns the brands Benson & Hedges, Winston, Camel, and Silk Cut. In the UK, smoking kills nearly 100,000 a people each year.
The British Museum has recently been called “out of touch” by environmentalists for accepting $65 million from oil giant BP to help it deliver its mega-revamp over the next decade. Nicholas Cullinan, who became the museum’s director in June, said about BP’s donation, “I think you have to have very good, clear reasons for turning down money that would help to keep the British Museum free to the public.”
It remains to be seen how he will answer questions about the museum’s relationship with JTI.
Five years ago, the British Museum’s website stated that 600 objects had been donated by the JTI Acquisition Fund. In November, the number has grown to 2,400. They include Japanese prints from the 18th to 21st centuries, photographs, comic books, sculptures, and porcelain sake sets. The JTI also finances a curatorial project position at the museum for Japanese material, and the tobacco company supports the museum’s Community Partnership Programme. The latter includes tours for blind people and the LGBTQ community.
“In times of reduced public funding, corporate sponsorship is vital to us fulfilling our mission to expand access to the collection,” a British Museum spokesperson said. “The JTI is a longstanding corporate partner and we are grateful to them for their support, which has enabled the museum to significantly increase accessibility and engagement with the collection for under-represented adults.
The museum is not the only major art institution in the UK accepting tobacco money. The Royal Academy also calls JTI a “premier” partner.
The British Museum’s financial relationship with JTI continues despite the recent so-called Sackler scandal, when several major arts institutions in the UK, Europe, and the US cut ties with the family who owns Purdue Phara, which makes OxyContin. The drug is at the epicenter of the prescription-opioid overdoes crisis in the US.
In 2019, the Louvre in Paris removed the Sackler name from its oriental antiquities wing, while Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art also dropped the name a year later. In the UK, the National Portrait Gallery was the first big museum to turn down a Sackler grant and in 2022, the V&A scrapped ties with the family.
