The British Museum has secured sponsorship from the Belarus-born hedge fund billionaire Igor Tulchinsky for its Bayeux Tapestry loan exhibition starting in September. According to the Financial Times, the sponsorship deal is worth £5m; both the museum and Tulchinsky were contacted for comment.
Tulchinsky emigrated to the United States as a child from Belarus; he is the founder and chief executive of WorldQuant, a quantitative investment firm with $17bn in assets according to Forbes, which values his personal fortune at $1.7bn.
At a recent dinner, George Osborne, the museum’s chair of trustees, thanked Tulchinsky for “step[ping] up to the plate in a way we never imagined possible”. Osborne recently said that he expects around 7.5 million visitors to attend the museum this year.
Writing in The Independent, Tulchinsky says: “My field is about reading patterns in incomplete data, weighing probabilities, and acting intentionally under uncertainty. History, I came to believe, is most honestly told not through textbooks but through objects and decisions, and the records left by human hands.”
He said “the Bayeux Tapestry” demonstrates such a mastery of craft, including in mathematics. The symmetries and proportions show careful calculation, suggesting relationships that later thinkers would formalise in ideas such as the Golden Ratio [a mathematical proportion].”
The textile, which depicts the 1066 Norman invasion and Battle of Hastings, will be displayed in the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery of the British Museum from September until July 2027 while its current home, the Bayeux Tapestry Museum in Normandy, undergoes renovations. The display will mark the first time it has been in Britain in almost 1,000 years.
The British museum has also announced that the first tranche of tickets for the Tapestry’s display will be released 1 July; these general admission tickets will initially be available for dates between September and December. Two more ticket releases will be made in October and then January next year for access from January to March 2027 and April to July 2027 respectively. Admission charges are to be announced.
The museum will be dedicating special opening hours for British school children to guarantee as much access as possible to the textile, the museum says. “Alongside special opening hours, the museum is also underway with plans for a national programme alongside the tapestry loan to support those unable to make it to London,” it adds in a statement. Details of the national programme are to be announced.
“I have spent much of my career trying to widen access to education through a tuition-free and accredited online university, through research programmes, and through initiatives creating access to change lives. The sponsorship of the exhibition includes a tailored schools’ learning programme,” adds Tulchinsky.
