Fitzwilliam Museum

Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK

Hellenica World, Paintings, Drawings

The Charente At Port-bertaud, Gustave Courbet

Hellenica World, Paintings, Drawings

Grotto with Figures, Abraham van Cuylenborch

Hellenica World, Paintings, Drawings Portrait of a seated man with slanted hat, Frans Hals

Hellenica World, Paintings, Drawings

Pamela tells a children's story, Joseph Highmore

Hellenica World, Paintings, Drawings Portrait of Dr. Benjamin Hoaldy, William Hogarth

Hellenica World, Paintings, Drawings

Altarpiece of Cambridge, Simone Martini

Hellenica World, Paintings, Drawings

Sibyl, Lorenzo Pasinelli

Hellenica World, Paintings, Drawings

Street in Moret-Sur-Loing, Alfred Sisley

Hellenica World, Paintings, Drawings

Winged female angel, Girolamo Mocetto

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. It receives around 470,000 visitors annually (2011–12).[1] 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.[1] The current Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum is Tim Knox.

Foundation & buildings

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.[2]

Collection

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, Sudan, Greece and Rome, Roman and 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 most notable works in the collection are the bas-reliefs from Persepolis.[3]

The Last of England, by Ford Madox Brown.
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. Composers 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.
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.[4] Sir Sydney Cockerell, who was serving as director of the museum at the time, went on to acquire a further 8 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 8th greatest painting in Britain in 2005's Radio 4 poll, the Greatest Painting in Britain Vote.

Anglo-American

Benjamin West – 2 paintings;

Dutch School

Aelbert Cuyp – 1 painting;
Gerrit Dou – 3 paintings;
Frans Hals – 1 painting;
Meyndert Hobbema – 2 paintings;
Adriaen van Ostade – 2 paintings;
Rembrandt – 1 painting;
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;

English School

Head of William Blake. Plaster cast by James De Ville Sept 1823 Fitzwilliam Museum

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

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

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

Holbein, Hans – 2 paintings;

Italian School

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;
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.[5][6][7][8][9]

Losses

On 25 January 2006, a member of the public tripped which resulted in three huge oriental porcelain vases being shattered and requiring painstaking reconstruction.[10] 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

The "Friends of the Fitzwilliam", founded in 1909, is a society supporting the museum, the oldest in Britain. One of the longest-serving members (1935–2003) was Denys Spittle, whose collection of manuscripts was exhibited in 2007 under the title "Private Pleasures: Illuminated manuscripts from Persia to Paris".
Directors
A Henry Moore sculpture outside the museum

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

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[13] 2007–2012
Tim Knox[14] 2012–