In his role as chairman of both the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (1985-95) and the Acceptance-in-Lieu Panel (2000-10), Jonathan Scott oversaw the mechanisms by which the nation acquires material evidence of its history and culture. In his time such notable pieces of sculpture as Canova's Three Graces, from Woburn, were stopped from export. The Canova was acquired jointly by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland. Works accepted under the in-lieu scheme included sculptural objects at West Wycombe Park (National Trust); the sixteenth-century Dacre Beasts to the Victoria and Albert Museum; Joseph Nollekens' Clytie to Towneley Hall Art Gallery, Burnley; Henry Moore's Bird Basket (1939) to the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; and numerous pieces by Barbara Hepworth to Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the Hepworth, Wakefield, National Museums Liverpool, Snape, Suffolk, and Tate St Ives. Two of Scott's three distinguished publications focused on the enduring European fascination with the Antique, as evidenced in its surviving sculpture.1An address given at the Memorial Service, St Mary the Virgin and St Mary Magdalen, Tetbury, Gloucestershire on 7 February 2013In the age in which we live, which sets such store by celebrity, facility and political correctness, Jonathan Scott was an outstanding and upstanding exception. I first met him in 2003 when he came as chairman on to the Acceptance-in-Lieu (AiL) Panel; acceptance-in-lieu being the system whereby, in Britain, works of cultural, historic and artistic significance are acquired by the nation for the nation in lieu of tax. His reputation from the Imperial War Museum (Trustee 1984-98), and the VA as had the status of Port Eliot with its cache of thirty Reynoldses. He patiently found resolutions. Some cases gave him particular pleasure: Titian's Venus Anadyomene at the National Gallery of Scotland; the collection of Woottons in the Great Hall at Longleat; and the statuary at Castle Howard In pursuit of the right solution he was always courteous, but always firm. He believed strongly that the work of the panel should benefit the whole country, and that the best pictures and sculpture should not automatically go to the big, national galleries and museums. When the Tate applied for an excellent William Scott to be allocated to Millbank on the grounds that they were the collectors of Scott, there was a well-argued counter-application from the Cecil Higgins Gallery in Bedford. …