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Description: | Includes collections of international importance, including work of European, American and Asian schools, ranging from the thirteenth century to the present day. Highlights include paintings by Italian Renaissance artists, particularly of the Venetian school, a superb collection of landscapes of all schools, a distinguished group of portraits and portrait miniatures by British artists and a remarkable range of works by French Impressionist painters. Notable among the drawings collection are works by draughtsmen of the Italian, French, Dutch and Flemish schools, and an outstanding group of British watercolours. The extensive print collection includes particularly strong holdings of Northern European prints, portrait prints, and a choice collection of Japanese woodcuts.
The Founder's collection of paintings began with the Dutch and Flemish pictures he inherited from his maternal grandfather, Sir Mathew Decker, Bt, an Amsterdam merchant born in 1679. To these his most spectacular additions were among the nine paintings he bought from the Orléans collection: Titian's Venus, Cupid and the Lute-player, Palma Vecchio's Venus and Cupid and Veronese's Hermes, Herse and Aglauros. All three share the same princely provenance: (?) Rudolph II of Prague; Christina of Sweden, Ducs d'Orléans. In 1834, the collection was augmented by 243 pictures, mostly Dutch and Flemish, bequeathed by Daniel Mesman. (Outside London, the Fitzwilliam boasts the most comprehensive Collection of Dutch paintings in Britain). In 1893, the Museum purchased fifteen early Italian paintings from the Charles Butler collection among which three panels of saints, three-quarters length, painted c.1320 by Simone Martini are outstanding, to be rivalled in the same field only by Professor F Fuller's bequest in 1923 of two of the predella panels from Domenico Veneziano's St Lucy altarpiece. In 1908, Charles Fairfax Murray made the first of his gifts which included three early Gainsboroughs, three Hogarths, a Reynolds and, as a centenary gift in 1916, Titian's incomparable late painting for Philip II of Spain, of Tarquin and Lucretia. During the twentieth century, the Collection of French paintings has grown with important acquisitions by virtually all of the major artists, from Poussin and Claude to Degas, Monet, Cézanne and Matisse. The bequest by John Tillotson in 1984 of thirty-two paintings by Barbizon painters and, that of Dr McDonald in 1991 of a wide-ranging Collection of pictures, especially rich in decorative paintings from the eighteenth century, have further enriched the Museum's French holdings. In the later twentieth century, gifts and bequests are headed by Alistair Hunter's collection of art of the present century, including Picasso's Cubist Head of 1910 and the second Lord Fairhaven's comprehensive collection of flower paintings and drawings, which comprises over seventy oils, more than nine hundred individually mounted works on paper and forty-four volumes of drawings by Ehret, Redouté and others. Among drawings, the largest holding is British (approximately 5,600). It began with the Founder's nostalgic memories of Italy drawn by J R Cozens, augmented in the early years by George Romney's son, the Revd John Romney of St John's College, and at mid-century by John Ruskin who initiated the fine collection of Turner watercolours with the gift of twenty-five representative sheets. The bequests of J R Holliday in 1927, F H H Guillemard in 1933, Sir Frank Brangwyn in 1943 and T W Bacon in 1950, have strengthened it still further.
The Museum's collection of Dutch drawings was transformed by the bequest of almost a thousand by Sir Bruce Ingram in 1963. Among the 627 Italian drawings, the gift of G T Clough in 1913 included sheets by Michelangelo and Raphael, and those bequeathed by a former Director, Louis C G Clarke, in 1960 provide some of the other highlights, by Leonardo, Correggio and Parmigianino. More recently, the benefaction of A S F Gow (1978) has added significantly to the later French drawings, which number 576. Mention should also be made of the 400 Indian and Persian miniatures, most of which were bequeathed by Manuk and Coles in 1948, representing a small but distinguished collection of the principal schools. By any standard, the Museum's collection of prints which began with the Founder's folios and was augmented in the nineteenth century by the transfer of prints from the University Library, is vast. It stands at upwards of 200,000 impressions and continues to grow at an impressive rate; since 1988, 3,064 prints have been accessioned, including a considerable number by American artists. We believe that the Fitzwilliam Museum is the only institution in this country apart from the British Museum to collect systematically in this area.
Few museums in the world contain on a single site collections of such variety and depth. Writing in his Foreword to the catalogue of the exhibition for Treasures from the Fitzwilliam which toured the United States in 1989-90, the then Director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, wrote that "like the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam addresses the history of culture in terms of the visual forms it has assumed, but it does so from the highly selective point of view of the collector connoisseur. Works of art have been taken into the collection not only for the historical information they reveal, but for their beauty, excellent quality, and rarity... It is a widely held opinion that the Fitzwilliam is the finest small museum in Europe".
- | Subjects: | Art Fine arts Paintings Prints Drawings | Source: | Cornucopia - Discovering UK Collections | FAX: | 01223 332 923 | Telephone: | 01223 332 900 | Identifier: | oai:www.cornucopia.org.uk:6343 | Go to resource |
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