Britain should be “shamed” into revising laws that make it easier for American collectors to donate art to our museums and galleries than Britons, the director of the British Museum says today.

Writing in The Times, Neil MacGregor announces the museum’s acquisition of more than 1,800 prints by the 19th-century Japanese master Kuniyoshi, the man responsible for bringing the image of the samurai to a mass audience.

The collection makes the museum “at a stroke . . . perhaps the richest European collection in this area”, Mr MacGregor writes. The prints, including samurai illustrations and portraits of Kabuki actors, landscapes and beautiful women, are a gift from Professor Arthur R. Miller, an American legal scholar.

Professor Miller has given the first instalment of 64 prints to the American Friends of the British Museum, with a promise to donate the rest, valued at several million dollars, in the future.

The donation is “a striking demonstration of the value of a tax structure in the US that favours lifetime giving to museums”, Mr MacGregor writes. “The gift also serves to highlight the noticeable lack of this kind of tax structure in this country . . . at the moment American taxpayers enjoy greater fiscal incentives to give objects to UK collections than do their British counterparts – an anomaly that ought to shame us into speedy action.”

The National Museum Directors’ Conference, the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council and Arts Council England are seven months into a campaign to persuade the Government to dismantle tax barriers to private giving. The Acceptance in Lieu scheme, which has brought more than £250 million worth of artworks into the cultural sector, kicks in only after the death of donors. There is no comparable tax scheme for the living, unlike in the US, Australia and France.

There is an urgent need to resolve the problem because government funding for museum acquisitions has ended and lottery support has been cut back.

The explosive inflation on the international art market has further limited museums’ buying power and it is not yet clear that recent corrections to the price of Western Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art at auction will extend to the rest of the sector. Private contributions are therefore likely to be the engine of future contributions to the permanent collections of Britain’s museums, which Mr MacGregor described as “uniquely rich” but vulnerable.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) was one of the leading lights of the Ukiyo-e or “Floating World” school of print-making. To make his work stand out in the vibrant consumer economy of 19th-century Edo (now Tokyo), he developed a specialism in samurai illustrations.

It was the twilight of their rule in Japan but Kuniyoshi’s dramatic prints brought the heroes of the past back to vivid, romanticised life.

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