Life and art collection
In his role as a merchant Angerstein has been said to have owned a third share in slave estates in Grenada, but this assertion is incorrect. The only evidence of his involvement in slave-owning plantations (and the likely basis of the fallacy) was indirect, and not financial. Angerstein's friend and client, George Peters, was owed money by the merchant Israel Wilkes. Angerstein and two others were made trustees for the creditors over Wilkes' assets, including two sugar estates in Grenada. Moreover, as a marine insurer, Angerstein also insured vessels involved in the slave trade.
Angerstein was chairman of Lloyd's from 1790 to 1796 and counted King George III, British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and artist Sir Thomas Lawrence among his friends. He was also on the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, an organisation with strong abolitionist connections.
After a number of knife attacks on women by the so-called "London Monster", Angerstein promised a reward of £100 for capture of the perpetrator.
Among his earliest art purchases was The Rape of the Sabines by Rubens. Later acquisitions included works by Rembrandt, Velázquez, Titian, Raphael, Correggio and Hogarth, plus early drawings by J. M. W. Turner. From the sale in London of the French Orleans Collection he bought The Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo and other works. After his death, thirty-eight of his finest paintings were bought by the British government for £60,000 to form the nucleus of the collection of the British National Gallery. Until the National Gallery was built in Trafalgar Square in London, the 38 works from Angerstein's collection were displayed in Angerstein's town house in Pall Mall.
He lived for some years in Greenwich in south-east London, leasing a 54-acre (22 ha) estate from Sir Gregory Page in 1774 and over the next two years building a house, Woodlands (designed by local architect George Gibson). This area is now known as Westcombe Park, part of a wide area on the north-eastern fringes of Blackheath that he sought to enclose in 1801. The house fell empty in 1870 when John's grandson William Angerstein relinquished the lease.
In 1806 Angerstein served as vice-president of the newly formed London Institution, and the previous year became a founding governor of the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom. Following the death of William Pitt the Younger in 1806, he commissioned Thomas Lawrence to paint a portrait of the former Prime Minister which is now in the Waterloo Chamber of Windsor Castle. As an active church-goer, he worshipped at St Alfege's Church, Greenwich, where he was also churchwarden.
