In the months leading to the UK’s Annual Budget on 26 November 2025, there was widespread public speculation about how best to tackle the evident black hole in government finances: whether government should cut expenditure, or increase tax revenues on income earned by ‘working people’, and/or on the value of ‘wealth’. Budget proposals are promulgated in the government’s annual Finance Bill, which Parliament will debate and decide early in 2026.
During this period, like its Westminster equivalent, France’s legislature will also consider its annual Finance Bill and the worryingly high debt-to-GDP ratio of around 115% (the UK’s is currently 96%). In a recent legislative debate, France’s Assemblée Nationale agreed a radical reform of its wealth tax regime. This change would discourage the accumulation of ‘unproductive wealth’, by taxing the value of assets that did not create jobs or otherwise contribute to economic activity – including ownership of art.
Unproductive assets would also include gold coins, classic cars, jewellery, yachts, private jets, and digital assets such as cryptocurrency. The threshold for tax liability would be €2m, payable at a single rate of 1%. Assets would be appraised annually, with tax due on increases in value – not on capital gains realised from profitable asset sales. Such valuation would doubtless place complex administrative burdens on the Directorate General of Public Finances, which would be responsible for locating, tracking and valuing assets – including those held outside France. If passed into law over coming months, it is not certain that the reform would generate more revenue than is produced by France’s current wealth tax, which only covers increases in real estate property values.
France’s art industry fears its trading economy will be destabilised and damaged by this potential tax change, so is currently mobilising key stakeholders to persuade legislators to vote against its enactment. Leading campaigners include the association of French gallery dealers, the Comité Professionel des Galeries d’Art, and the international art fair group Art Basel, which recently issued a joint statement reproving the reform. Supported by 127 further signatories representing auctioneers, art experts and advisers, as well as artists rights collecting societies, the campaigners contend that at a time when ‘France is gradually catching up with London in the post-Brexit system’, the proposed tax on the ownership of artworks ‘would lead collectors to organise their transactions, storage, and conservation facilities in Switzerland, the United States or the United Kingdom.’
Moreover, many France-based artists have launched a separate petition against the proposed law: ‘We, artists, are speaking out today to defend our professions and refuse to allow the fruit of our creation to be reduced to a speculative value.’
These artists’ concerns echo those voiced to this columnist by Henry Moore five decades ago. Moore was not only a leading artist of the post-war era, he was also one of the most financially successful. Between 1949 and 1959, the market value of his works increased by 900%. In 1968, The Wall Street Journal described his work as a ‘blue chip investment’, which could be reliably resold for large profits. By the mid-1970s, Moore was generating annual profits of over £1m. He became increasingly concerned that he was paying tax at the rate of 83% on earned income and 98% on investment income, estimating that he had paid over £4m to the Inland Revenue since the mid-1960s.
In 1974, Moore was alarmed by the newly-elected Labour government’s manifesto pledge to introduce a new wealth tax regime. Labour’s objective was to ‘redistribute income and wealth’, as described in its statements at the time: ‘We shall introduce an annual Wealth Tax on the rich … Bring in a new tax on major transfers of personal wealth … Heavily tax speculation in property … Seek to eliminate tax dodging across the whole field.’ Had these measures been enacted, Moore was fearful that the market value of his stock of works would require him to pay ‘obscene’ amounts of tax – as he said, ‘every time I handle a piece of clay, I worry that I could be liable to pay tax on it’.
Moore was not alone in voicing his opposition to the government’s wealth tax plans. In 1975, he and 33 other artists (including Kenneth Armitage, Francis Bacon, Reg Butler, Richard Hamilton, Allen Jones, Bernard Meadows, John Piper and Joe Tilson) wrote a letter to the Editor of London’s Times newspaper, headed ‘Wealth Tax and the Living Artist’. They complained that the proposed wealth tax on art would discourage discriminating patrons from purchasing works, be a threat of almost ‘unbelievable imbecility’ to tax artists on their ‘stock’ of unsold works, and encourage artists to emigrate or cease working. They concluded by asserting that ‘artistic discrimination is not a matter of money or speculation’. Parliamentary debates also highlighted the dangers of levying an annual tax on the value of assets such as historic houses and art.
In 1976, Labour decided its annual wealth tax plans were unworkable and abandoned them, instead preferring to tax inherited wealth based on a recipient’s lifetime accumulation – via what the UK today calls Inheritance Tax. Moore, then aged 78, still had serious concerns about the potential financial impact of death duties on his large collection of work. Consequently, in 1977 with advice and help from art and tax lawyers, Moore and his daughter established two separate interrelated entities that continue to operate today as significant public-facing cultural institutions.
The Henry Moore Foundation is a UK-registered limited liability company with charity status: its mission is to preserve Moore’s legacy by supporting sculptors and creating exhibitions; and to encourage public appreciation of the visual arts, particularly sculpture, through exhibitions, research, and support for innovative projects. Because of legal trading restrictions on registered charities, a commercial arm of the foundation was also established, as a separate UK-registered company: it paid Moore a salary until his death in 1986, owns and deals with his works, and conveys trading profits to its parent foundation. Initially named Raymond Spencer Limited, after Moore’s father, it was later renamed HMF Enterprises Limited.
In 2026, as legislatures in the UK and France finally determine their respective annual finance laws, perhaps Moore’s case for opposing wealth tax on works of art will be borne in mind – coupled with the epigram by French writer, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
© Henry Lydiate 2025