Lottery cash helps Tate buy Constable and Zoffany masterpieces

The Tate gallery has acquired important paintings by John Constable and Johan Zoffany with help from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The paintings, which were bought from private collections and will be exhibited at Tate Britain, are said to be fine examples of both masters' work.

Two portraits by Zoffany, a German-born artist who migrated to Britain, featuring the children of the 3rd Earl of Bute, have been allocated to Tate Britain with funding from Tate members and the National Art Collections Fund, as well as the lottery money.

Funding from the same group of contributors was used to buy Constable's Suffolk landscape Fen Lane, East Bergholt, a masterpiece that was a turning point in the painter's career.

Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate's director, said the acquisitions were exemplary paintings by two of the most significant figures in British art. Sir Nicholas Goodison, the chairman of the National Art Collections Fund, said: "Constable's Fen Lane is one of the artist's most engaging Suffolk scenes, marking a significant point in the development of open-air landscape painting. Zoffany's portraits of the Bute children hold an equally important place in the history of society portraiture."

Fen Lane, East Bergholt, belongs to a group of mid-size canvasses that Constable painted in the open air between 1814 and 1817. It was unknown until 1985, when it resurfaced in a private collection. The innovative techniquesinfluenced landscape painting, eventually leading to impressionism. Zoffany's Three Sons of John, 3rd Earl of Bute and Three Daughters of John, 3rd Earl of Bute were bought from the present Marquess of Bute.

* With a marginally less furtive demeanour than he had displayed there in the past, Sir Paul McCartney went back to Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery yesterday to open the first major exhibition of his art.

The collection by Sir Paul, who, in his words, spent afternoons at the Walker with John Lennon "sagging off from school" in the mid-1950s, is open until 4 August.