Fitzwilliam Museum
![]() The main entrance to the Fitzwilliam Museum, facing Trumpington Street. | |
Established | 1816, by will of Richard FitzWilliam, 7th Viscount FitzWilliam |
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Location | Cambridge, United Kingdom |
Coordinates | 52°12′01″N 0°07′10″E / 52.200278°N 0.119444°E |
Type | University Museum of fine art and antiquities |
Collection size | approx. 550,000 |
Visitors | 397,169 (2017) [1] |
Director | Professor Geoff Ward (acting) |
Website | www |
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The Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge, located on Trumpington Street opposite Fitzwilliam Street in central Cambridge, England. Admission is free.
The museum is the lead museum for the University of Cambridge Museums consortium, one of 16 Major Partner Museum services funded by Arts Council England to lead the development of the museums sector.[2]
Foundation and buildings
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The museum was founded in 1816 with the legacy of the library and art collection of the 7th Viscount FitzWilliam. The bequest also included £100,000 "to cause to be erected a good substantial museum repository". The collection was initially placed in the old Perse School building in Free School Lane. It was moved in 1842 to the Old Schools (at that time the University Library). The "Founder's Building" itself was designed by George Basevi, completed by C. R. Cockerell and opened in 1848; the entrance hall is by Edward Middleton Barry and was completed in 1875. The first stone of the new building was laid by Gilbert Ainslie in 1837. A further large bequest was made to the University in 1912 by Charles Brinsley Marlay, including a sum of £80,000 and a collection of 84 pictures. A two-storey extension, paid for partly by the Courtauld family, was added in 1931.[3]
Collection
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The museum has five departments: Antiquities; Applied Arts; Coins and Medals; Manuscripts and Printed Books; and Paintings, Drawings and Prints. Together these cover antiquities from ancient Egypt, Nubia, Greece and Rome, Romano-Egyptian art, Western Asiatic displays, and a new gallery of Cypriot art; applied arts, including English and European pottery and glass, furniture, clocks, fans, armour, Chinese, Japanese and Korean art, rugs and samplers; coins and medals; illuminated, literary and music manuscripts and rare printed books; paintings, including masterpieces by Simone Martini, Domenico Veneziano, Titian, Veronese, Rubens, Van Dyck, van Goyen, Frans Hals, Canaletto, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Constable, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne and Picasso and a fine collection of 20th-century art; miniatures, drawings, watercolours and prints. Among the notable works in the antiquities collection is a bas-relief from Persepolis.[4]
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Music manuscripts
There is also the largest collection of 16th-century Elizabethan virginal manuscript music written by some of the most notable composers of the time, such as William Byrd, Doctor John Bull, Orlando Gibbons and Thomas Tallis.
Egyptian collection
The Egyptian Galleries at the Fitzwilliam Museum reopened in 2006 after a two-year, £1.5 million programme of refurbishment, conservation and research.[citation needed]
Paintings
The museum has a particularly extensive collection of Turner, which has its origins in a set of 25 watercolour drawings donated to the university by John Ruskin in 1861.[5] Sir Sydney Cockerell, who was serving as director of the museum at the time, went on to acquire a further eight Turner watercolours and some of his writings.
Many items in the museum are on loan from colleges of the University, for example an important group of impressionist paintings owned by King's College, which includes Cézanne's The Abduction and a study for Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Seurat.
The museum's collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings includes a version of Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England, voted eighth-greatest painting in Britain in 2005's Radio 4 poll, the Greatest Painting in Britain Vote.
- Anglo-American
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- Benjamin West – 2 paintings;
- Dutch School
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- Aelbert Cuyp – 1 painting;
- Gerrit Dou – 3 paintings;
- Frans Hals – 1 painting;
- Meyndert Hobbema – 2 paintings;
- Adriaen van Ostade – 2 paintings;
- Rembrandt – 1 painting;
- Jacob van Ruisdael – 5 paintings;
- Salomon van Ruysdael – 1 painting;
- Jan Steen – 3 paintings;
- Adriaen van de Velde – 1 painting;
- Willem van de Velde the Younger – 1 painting;
- Jan Weenix – 1 painting;
- Philip Wouwerman – 2 paintings;
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/James_S_De_Ville_1776-1846_Head_of_William_Blake_-_Plaster_cast_-_Sept_1823_Fitzwilliam_Museum1.jpg/220px-James_S_De_Ville_1776-1846_Head_of_William_Blake_-_Plaster_cast_-_Sept_1823_Fitzwilliam_Museum1.jpg)
- William Beechey – 1 painting;
- William Blake – 4 paintings, and hundreds of watercolors, drawings, prints & manuscripts;
- John Constable – 12 paintings;
- Thomas Gainsborough – 8 paintings;
- William Hogarth – 9 paintings;
- John Hoppner – 1 painting;
- Sir Godfrey Kneller – 15 paintings;
- Edwin Henry Landseer – 1 painting;
- Thomas Lawrence – 1 painting;
- Peter Lely – 1 painting;
- Joshua Reynolds – 4 paintings;
- Joseph Stannard – 1 painting;
- George Stubbs – 3 paintings;
- J. M. W. Turner – 1 painting ("Welsh mountain landscape", 1799–1800);
- Flemish School
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- Jan Brueghel the Elder – 5 paintings;
- Pieter Bruegel the Elder – 1 painting;
- Frans Francken the Younger – 1 painting;
- Jan Mabuse – 1 painting;
- Peter Paul Rubens – 14 paintings;
- David Teniers the Younger – 2 paintings;
- Anthony van Dyck – 5 paintings;
- French School
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- Eugène Delacroix – 4 paintings;
- François Boucher – 1 painting;
- Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot – 3 paintings;
- Edgar Degas – 7 paintings;
- Gaspard Dughet – 3 paintings;
- Paul Gauguin – 1 painting;
- Claude Lorrain – 1 painting;
- Jean-Baptiste Greuze – 1 painting;
- Jean-Étienne Liotard – 2 paintings;
- Claude Monet – 4 paintings;
- Camille Pissarro – 6 paintings;
- Nicolas Poussin – 1 painting;
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir – 11 paintings;
- Théodore Rousseau – 3 paintings;
- Georges-Pierre Seurat – 1 painting;
- Jean-François de Troy – 1 painting;
- Vincent van Gogh – 1 painting
- German School
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- Holbein, Hans – 2 paintings;
- Italian School
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- Alessandro Allori – 1 painting;
- Jacopo Bassano – 2 paintings;
- Canaletto – 6 paintings;
- Annibale and Ludovico Carracci – 4 paintings;
- Bernardo Daddi – 1 painting;
- Carlo Dolci – 3 painting;
- Domenichino – 1 painting;
- Duccio di Buoninsegna – 1 painting;
- Gentile da Fabriano – 1 painting;
- Domenico Fetti – 5 paintings;
- Raffaellino del Garbo – 1 painting;
- Lattanzio Gambara – 8 paintings;
- Luca Giordano – 12 paintings;
- Guercino – 1 painting;
- Pietro Longhi – 2 paintings;
- Lorenzo Lotto – 1 painting;
- Andrea Mantegna – 9 canvases known as The Triumphs of Caesar
- Parmigianino – 2 paintings and 30 drawings
- Palma il Vecchio – 2 paintings;
- Pietro Perugino – 1 painting;
- Giambattista Pittoni – 1 painting;
- Francesco Pesellino – 1 painting;
- Raphael – 8 Paintings;
- Raffaellino del Garbo – 1 painting;
- Guido Reni – 1 painting;
- Sebastiano Ricci – 9 paintings;
- Giulio Romano – 6 paintings;
- Andrea Sacchi – 130 drawings;
- Andrea del Sarto – 2 paintings;
- Zanobi Strozzi – 1 painting;
- Tintoretto – 5 paintings;
- Titian – 4 paintings;
- Perin del Vaga – 2 paintings;
- Giorgio Vasari – 1 painting;
- Paolo Veronese – 3 paintings;
- Antonio Verrio – 1 painting;
- Federico Zuccari – 1 painting;
- Francesco Zuccarelli – 27 paintings;
Michelangelo bronzes
In 2015, the museum displayed two bronze statues (the Rothschild Bronzes) that it believed to be the work of Italian Renaissance artist Michaelangelo. If true, they would be the only known surviving bronze sculptures by the artist. The pair of statues depict naked, apparently drunk, men riding panthers. Art historian Paul Joannides connected the statues to a drawing in the Musée Fabre by an apprentice of Michelangelo depicting the same subject in the same pose.[6][7][8][9][10]
Losses
On the 26th January 2006 a visitor, Nick Flynn, who had tripped on his shoelaces and fallen down a stairway, severely damaged three Qing Dynasty vases which had been displayed there since 1948. [1] In April 2006, Mr Flynn was arrested on charges of causing criminal damage. [2] Charges against him were later dropped.[3] The first of the vases was restored by experts and put back on display in August 2006. [4]
At around 19:30 BST on 13 April 2012, 18 valuable and culturally significant Chinese works of art were stolen.[11] The burglars were sentenced to a combined 18 years in jail.[12]
Friends of Fitzwilliam
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The "Friends of the Fitzwilliam", founded in 1909, is a society supporting the museum, and the oldest such society in Britain.[citation needed]
Directors
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/HenryMoore_RecliningFigure_1951.jpg/220px-HenryMoore_RecliningFigure_1951.jpg)
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- Sidney Colvin 1876–1884
- Sir Charles Walston 1883–1889
- John Henry Middleton 1889–1892
- Montague Rhodes James 1893–1908
- Sir Sydney Cockerell 1908–1937
- L.C.G. Clarke 1937–1946
- Carl Winter 1946–1966
- Sir David Piper 1966–1973
- Professor Michael Jaffé 1973–1990
- Simon Swynfen Jervis 1990–1995
- Duncan Robinson 1995–2007
- Timothy Potts[14] 2007–2012
- Tim Knox[15] 2012––2018
See also
- Primavera Gallery – commercial gallery on King's Parade that has been the subject of an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam
References
- ^ "ALVA - Association of Leading Visitor Attractions". www.alva.org.uk. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
- ^ "The Fitzwilliam Museum". www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
- ^ The University of Cambridge — The Fitzwilliam Museum, British History Online, UK.
- ^ A Persepolis Relief in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Richard Nicholls and Michael Roaf Iran, Vol. 15, (1977), pp. 146–152 Published by: British Institute of Persian Studies
- ^ "Fitzwilliam Museum collections". University of Cambridge. 2010. Retrieved 4 September 2010.
- ^ "The Fitzwilliam Museum : Home". Fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 5 September 2015. Retrieved 29 August 2015.
{{cite web}}
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suggested) (help) - ^ Mark Brown (30 January 2015). "Michelangelo's bronze panther-riders revealed after 'Renaissance whodunnit' | Art and design". The Guardian. Retrieved 29 August 2015.
- ^ "Michelangelo: The story of the bronze riders". The Economist. 2 February 2015. Retrieved 29 August 2015.
- ^ "Nude, drunk and riding on panthers: Michelangelo's lost masterpiece discovered | Public Radio International". Pri.org. 3 February 2015. Retrieved 29 August 2015.
- ^ "Bronze sculptures 'may be by Michelangelo' - BBC News". Bbc.com. Retrieved 29 August 2015.
- ^ "Fitzwilliam Museum theft: Chinese jade art 'worth millions'". BBC News. 18 April 2012.
- ^ "Fitz Robbers get 18 years | The Tab Cambridge". Cambridgetab.co.uk. Archived from the original on 3 October 2012. Retrieved 15 July 2014.
{{cite web}}
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suggested) (help) - ^ "The Fitzwilliam Museum is 200 today". University of Cambridge, Research. February 2016. Retrieved 1 March 2016.
- ^ New Director Appointed for Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK, 1 June 2007.
- ^ Mr Tim Knox will succeed Timothy Potts as Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum when he takes up the post in April., University of Cambridge, UK, Retrieved July 2013.
External links
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg/30px-Commons-logo.svg.png)
- Fitzwilliam Museum
- Museums established in 1816
- Art museums and galleries in Cambridgeshire
- Museums in Cambridge
- Museums of the University of Cambridge
- Grade I listed buildings in Cambridge
- Grade I listed museum buildings
- Numismatic museums in the United Kingdom
- Egyptological collections in England
- Museums of ancient Rome in the United Kingdom
- Museums of ancient Greece
- Museums of Ancient Near East
- Decorative arts museums in England
- George Basevi buildings
- 1816 establishments in England