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The FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM SYNDICATE beg leave to present their one hundred and fifty-third Annual Report to the Council:
The Courtyard Development has dominated the year under review (August 2001 to July 2002). During the Michaelmas Term the staff of the Museum began the process of packing for storage thousands of objects, works of art which were in galleries or reserves adjacent to the courtyard. At the same time the re-arrangement of the upper galleries in the Founder's Building began, as part of an exercise to ensure that a high proportion of our most important works of art remained on view during the period of construction. Happily, the re-hanging of Galleries I-V has met with widespread approval, for which we are grateful especially to David Scrase, Keeper of Paintings, Drawings, and Prints, and his colleagues of that department. From January onwards all of the twentieth-century extensions of the Museum were closed to the public, but we were able to keep open during normal hours both floors of Founder's. With the exception of the Department of Applied Arts and the Reference Library, the curatorial departments were able to continue to receive visitors and scholars, albeit with certain restrictions, and the Upper Marlay Gallery was made available for teaching and group visits. The arrival of a crane in the spring made it clear not only to our users but to anyone catching a glimpse of the Museum from Trumpington Street or Fen Causeway that work had begun. Since then it has continued according to plan, in large part thanks to excellent co-operation between the general contractor, Amec, and the staff of the Museum. We remain confident that construction will be completed on time, in September 2003, and that the entire Museum, with all of its extensions and improvements, will be in full service, by the summer of 2004.
In October Dr Michael Matzke resigned the post of Assistant Keeper in the Department of Coins and Medals in order to take up a Lectureship at the University of Marburg. In April we welcomed in his place Adrian Popescu, a specialist in Greek and Roman coinage who had worked previously for the Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service and the Coin Cabinet of the Institute of Archaeology in Bucharest. Dr Sally-Ann Ashton, an Egyptologist formerly at the Petrie Museum, University of London, joined the staff in March as an Assistant Keeper in the Department of Antiquities. During the spring Dr Pamela Davis, the Fundraising Executive who was seconded part-time to the Museum by the University's Development Office, returned to her duties there, and Jayne Vaughan-Lane who worked alongside her in the Museum chose to transfer shortly afterwards. We owe debts of gratitude to both of them for playing key roles in the Courtyard Appeal. During the summer, the Museum's Development Office, the cost of which is borne by the Fitzwilliam Museum Trust, was reorganized with Sharon Maurice as the new Development Officer. She joins us after working for the Archives Centre at Churchill College and the Warburg Institute, University of London.
In a year of transition, there were a number of retirements and other changes among members of the assistant staff. We thank all of them for their services to the Museum but wish to make special mention of Andrew Lee who left after more than twenty years as Craftsman.
We record our congratulations to David Scrase upon his election to a Fellowship at New Hall.
We acknowledge with profound gratitude the decision of the Executors of the late Paul Mellon, KBE (CLA), to allocate a further $10 million to the Museum from the residue of his estate. With their agreement, a part of this additional bequest has been applied to specific capital projects such as the re-lighting of the galleries although it is their wish and ours that much of the gift will be preserved as endowment to provide income for new posts, conservation of the collections and future enhancements of the Museum. In the short term, however, the Executors have indicated that income from the Mellon Fund should be reserved to cover any shortfall in the cost of the building in the courtyard, to which £1 million was apportioned from Mr Mellon's initial bequest.
To turn to the accounts for the year, the contribution from the Chest amounted to £408,800 out of a total income of £2,017,540. We reported last year on the slight increase in funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board, which rose from £875,879 to £925,000. Endowment income added a further £274,159 and the balance of £351,050 came from a combination of earned income, grants, and donations. We remain extremely grateful to Cambridge City Council for the provision of £17,900 towards the cost of weekend opening and to South Cambridgeshire District Council for a grant of £12,000 towards education and outreach. The City also contributed £10,000 to the Courtyard Appeal from its Millennium Fund.
While the third and final year of Designation Challenge Funding 1999-2002 expired in April, Resource, the Council for Museums, Archives, and Libraries, awarded a further £100,025 to the Museum under the terms of the successor scheme. This enabled us to retain staff and to continue documentation work with a further emphasis on public access to the collections via the Web. A grant of £194,164 from the Joint Information Systems Committee under the Focus of Access to Information Resources programme will allow us in 2002-04 to continue documentation in the Departments of Antiquities and Coins and Medals, the results of which will be disseminated not only through our own website but by a process of 'harvesting' via the Arts and Humanities Data Service.
In the year under review, the work of the Museum's Education Department was supported by a large number of contributors, public and private. In the latter category, several wish to remain anonymous; we thank them alongside the Arts Council of England, Cambridge City Council, Cambridgeshire County Council, the Costakis and Leto Severis Foundation, the Department for Education and Skills, East England Arts, the Heritage Lottery Millennium Fund, the Museums and Galleries Access Fund (HLF), the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Pye Foundation, the R.K. Charitable Trust, South Cambridgeshire District Council, the South Eastern Museums Service, and Trinity College Cambridge.
The support of Trinity College deserves to be emphasized since it has been extended to so many aspects of the Museum's activities. In addition to the contribution of £1 million to the Courtyard Appeal, in the year under review the College has renewed its commitment to share with the Museum for a further three years the cost and services of a Conservator of Manuscripts and Printed Books. After providing half the cost of employing a Conservator of Metals for the past five years, the Isaac Newton Trust has agreed to fund a Conservatorship of Objects on a similar basis.
Individual curatorial departments continue to enjoy the support of numerous benefactors. Donors of objects are acknowledged below, in addition to which we wish to record our thanks to the Costakis and Leto Severis Foundation and the Worshipful Company of Grocers for their contributions to the Department of Antiquities. Support for the Department of Coins and Medals continued from the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the British Academy, Gonville and Caius College, the Robinson Charitable Trust, the Fondation Wiener-Anspach, and Christopher Jeeps. We also wish to thank our Honorary Keeper, Professor James Marrow, Dr Emily Marrow, and the Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Fund for their continued interest in and support for the Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books.
It was inevitable that the Museum's trading activities would be curtailed by the Courtyard Development, especially after the Shop and the Café closed in December. Even so, despite the anticipated drop in the number of visitors and an unexpected decline in overseas markets for paper products, the Enterprises company (FMS) declared a net profit of £2,219 for the financial year which ended on 31 January 2002. A month later, in February, a new shop opened at 33 Trumpington Street, directly opposite the main entrance of the Museum. We congratulate the General Manager of FME on taking this bold step to extend the activities of the company in a way which raises the Museum's profile.
Twice during the year, the Museum benefited from the allocation by H.M. Government of works of art accepted in lieu of capital taxes. Pierre Bonnard's delightfully intimate painting of The Meal (1899) was acquired with additional contributions from the National Art Collections Fund and the Resource/V & A Purchase Grant Fund. The allocation of Roelandt Savery's Still-life with flowers in a glass berkemeyer, with a lizard, frog, and dragonfly, painted in oils on copper in 1637, was particularly appropriate; he is one of relatively few major artists whose work was unrepresented in the Broughton Collection of Flower Paintings.
For several years we have acknowledged the generosity of Sir Ivor and Lady Batchelor and Sir Nicholas and Lady Goodison. The last proved to be no exception, nor was it in the cases of Professors Philip Grierson and Ted Buttrey, whose respective contributions to the Department of Coins and Medals comprised both cash and kind. Professor Michael Jaye (Rutgers University) made a particularly appropriate as well as important gift of material to supplement the Linnell Archive together with an album of etchings by Charles Reade (1790-1851) and a collection of fifty-two satirical prints, all in memory of Angela Crookenden. Professor Ronald Pickvance, a graduate of Christ's College, presented a fan design by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), a snow scene painted in watercolours on linen, in memory of his wife Georgina Rosamond Pickvance (1932-1977). Professor Luke Herrmann gave three works on paper from the Bruce Ingram collection through the National Art Collections Fund; a drawing of a windmill by James Ward (1769-1859), a landscape in watercolour by John Glover (1769-1849), and another, with birds in the landscape, by George Edwards (1694-1773). Thanks to an anonymous donor we acquired six works by twentieth-century artists, ranging from two rare futurist compositions by Alexander Bogomazov (1880-1930) to a bronze bust of the painter Francis Bacon executed by William Redgrave in 1962.
A number of prominent artists gave work to the Museum during the year including Frank Auerbach and Bill Jacklin. Syndics, Honorary Keepers, and members of staff appear regularly in the list of donors, their gifts reflecting the vast fund of loyalty and goodwill upon which the Museum is able to draw. It has also been a year in which the Friends of the Fitzwilliam have excelled themselves in supporting acquisitions. They would wish their list of gifts to be headed by the brooch and matching earrings in gold, made c. 1860, which they presented to commemorate their former Social Secretary, the late Sue Purdy. Chronologically, the earliest of their gifts was the terracotta statue of an actor in bird costume, Greek, from the third-second centuries BC. From the Middle Ages, they enabled us to acquire a silver penny of the Cambridge mint from the reign of Henry I. They contributed once again to the growing collection of Japanese prints by giving a spectacular group of actor prints by Utagawa Kunisada (1797-1864). Finally, the Friends have been particularly helpful in enabling the Museum to acquire contemporary works, including Maggi Hambling's compelling charcoal portrait of Henrietta Moraes which was drawn on 2 November 1998 and Marc Quinn's Garden2, a set of eight pigment prints which that artist produced in 2000.
Turning to purchases, we are deeply conscious of our debt to external bodies for enabling us to make a number of major acquisitions. Were it not for the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the National Art Collections Fund (NACF) and the Resource/V & A Purchase Grant-in-aid, museums such as ours would be unable to go to market. The modello which Federico Barocci drew for his painting of The Institution of the Eucharist in 1604 is an exceptional work for several reasons. The alterations to it which the artist made in oils almost certainly reflect the wishes of his patron, Pope Clement VIII, who commissioned the altarpiece for the chapel which commemorates his parents, the Aldobrandini, in the church of S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. In the seventeenth century it belonged to the painter Sir Peter Lely before it was acquired by the Earls of Pembroke. Thanks to grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Art Collections Fund, its purchase by the Museum ensured that it remained in this country. A further grant from the NACF enabled us to buy an exquisite ivory beaker carved with figures representing Diana and her attendants returning from the hunt, the work of an unidentified Flemish artist of the second half of the seventeenth century. For the sheet of studies by Taddeo Zuccaro (1529-66), we were able to combine contributions from the NACF and the Resource/V & A Purchase Fund and it was the latter fund which was crucial in securing an Aegean straight-sided one-handled cup in cream clay decorated with a pattern of stylised lilies in brown glaze, from the fifteenth century BC. In every one of these cases, the cost to the Museum was a very small fraction of the commercial value of the object and was met from a restricted purchase fund unavailable for any other purpose. One such is the Fairhaven Fund for the purchase of works by British landscape painters. This year we applied it to an evocative small study in oils by Michael Andrews (1928-95) made for what turned out to be, sadly, his last major series of paintings c. 1990-95, which were inspired by the Thames estuary.
In the knowledge that construction would interrupt the Museum's programme of temporary exhibitions, we determined to end 2001 on a high note. We reported last year on the success of the exhibitions which ran through the summer months, led by Town and Gown: Cambridge on Parade which was timed to co-incide with the city's octocentennial celebrations marking the grant of a charter by King John. In October the Adeane Gallery was transformed by the ingenious designs of Ivor Heal to accommodate Heroes and Artists: Popular Art and the Brazilian Imagination, an exhibition produced in collaboration with BrasilConnects as part of the international festival of the arts which marked the quincentenary of that country. We are indebted especially to our guest curator, Dr Tania Tribe, Lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and her husband Christopher Tribe, without whose unfailing assistance the project would not have been realized.
Also during the Michaelmas Term we hosted a smaller but no less remarkable exhibition of Flaming Pottery: Art and Landscape in Jomon Japan. Thanks to the support of the Japan Foundation, the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and Kokugakuin University, we were able to bring to Cambridge some of the oldest extant pottery in the world, much of it from the Niigata Prefectural Museum of History, located in the city of Nagaoka on the banks of the Shinano River and next to the site of Umadaka, one of the most important settlements known to have existed in ancient Japan. Our guest curator, Dr Simon Kaner, was extremely successful in recruiting students from New Hall and elsewhere to work on the interpretation of this culture remote from our own in terms of both time and space. He was also instrumental in providing a hands-on replica of one of the oldest exhibits for visually impaired visitors and helped our Education Department to devise two workshops in conjunction with Wysing Arts. Along with a three-part series of exhibitions of Kunisada and Kabuki held in the Shiba Gallery, we offered Flaming Pottery as our contribution to the Japan 2001 Festival. In its course, on 18 October, the Vice-Chancellors of Cambridge University and Anglia Polytechnic University co-hosted a reception in the Museum.
Finally, in November the Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books mounted an exhibition of legal manuscripts from the Middle Ages, drawing upon Cambridge collections generally. The catalogue, which set new standards for the description and analysis of legal texts, was written by Dr Robert Gibbs, University of Glasgow, and Dr Susan L'Engle, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, and was published in book form by Harvey Miller-Brepols.
Rather than consign numerous works of art to storage for a period of two years, we determined to pursue an active lending policy for the duration. As a result, an exhibition of eighteen Paintings from the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge was shown at the National Gallery from 23 March to 19 May, before those works, including Titian's late masterpiece of Tarquin and Lucretia, were integrated into the hang of the Gallery's permanent collection. Similarly, Tate Britain accepted on loan a group of works by Gainsborough, Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner, and other British artists. Thanks to the generosity of Daniel Katz we were able to produce a catalogue of our Renaissance and Baroque bronzes, written by Dr Victoria Avery with a technical section by Jo Dillon, Conservator of Metals, which was published to coincide with their exhibition at the Daniel Katz Gallery in St James's, London. It was opened on 11 June by The Rt. Hon. the Baroness Blackstone, Minister for the Arts. Outside London, we lent early works by Gainsborough from his Suffolk period to Gainsborough's House in Sudbury. These included his portrait of John Kirby, the author of the first topographical work on the county of Suffolk, The Suffolk Traveller, published in 1735.
To Abbot Hall, Kendal, we entrusted a group of eighteenth-century British paintings which complement the permanent collection there along with a number of important twentieth-century works of art. The National Trust agreed to house appropriate furniture at Wimpole and Oxburgh and several Colleges and University Departments took advantage of our offer to lend to suitably secure locations around Cambridge, paintings and sculpture which could not be shown in the Museum. Although such an active loans policy has placed an additional burden on the staff of the Museum, and involves the objects, however slightly, in increased risks, we remain confident that the benefits now and later of sharing our treasures outweigh any lingering doubts or reservations.
A detailed report on university teaching carried out in the Museum by staff and others, together with a list of publications by members of staff has been received by us and forwarded to the Council. It underlines the importance of the collections in research and teaching generally and the extent to which qualified members of staff contribute directly to University teaching. Collectively they gave more than sixty lectures or classes to undergraduates and graduate students of this University in a number of Faculties including Architecture and History of Art, Classics, English, Archaeology and Anthropology, History, Modern and Medieval Languages, Oriental Studies, and Theology. They supervised undergraduates and research students and served as assessors and examiners.
Although building works have interrupted the normal routines of the curatorial departments, every effort has been made within these constraints to make the collections available to colleagues in Cambridge and elsewhere for both research and teaching. Work has continued without interruption on Medieval European Coinage, the project which began twenty years ago under the direction of Professor Philip Grierson and involves an international team of scholars co-ordinated by the Keeper of Coins and Medals. In the Departments of Antiquities and Applied Arts, conservators and keepers have worked together on technical problems. In the Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books, Dr Panayotova has begun in earnest preparations for the great exhibition of medieval manuscripts in Cambridge collections which we plan to hold jointly with the University Library in 2005 and in the Department of Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Mr Scrase continued to work on a full catalogue of our Italian drawings while his colleague Ms Munro took full advantage of permission to work off-site to work on our collections of French art. We cite these only as examples of the quality and range of academic activities which continued in spite of the other demands on staff time.
Throughout the Museum the year under review has been a challenging one. For the Education Department it meant working without access to parts of the collection which have often featured prominently in its activities; armour, illuminated manuscripts, glass and ceramics, and Impressionist paintings, for instance. Without neglecting their regular users, Frances Sword and her colleagues decided that they would turn these unusual circumstances to advantage by experimenting and developing new services for delivery from 2004 onwards. In the past year they identified adult learners and social inclusion as their two main priorities.
For several years the weekly series of lunchtime gallery talks, Art in Context, has proved to be popular, attracting local audiences of fifty or sixty. During Museums and Galleries Month 2002 these were supplemented by four talks on Relative Values, led by Dr Paul Taylor on the subject of Dutch tulipomania. But with new audiences in mind, the Department offered StArt, a series of drop-in taster sessions held during Adult Learners Week. Building on a successful working relationship with the Social Inclusion Unit of Coleridge Community College, Write On provided ten challenging young teenagers with the opportunity to continue gallery sessions with writing and acting at school, guided neither by curriculum nor timetable but by the resourcefulness of Frances Sword and Simon Miles.
Although, as we expected, the total number of visitors was lower than last year, 159,484 as opposed to 231,827, the number of schools visits remained constant around 18,000, and in some areas such as Holiday and Family Workshops, there was a marked increase (26 events in 2001 compared with 17 in 2000). Overall, the Department arranged 137 separate events for adults, including several for those with special needs. During the academical year an estimated 5,320 adult learners visited the Museum, in 266 group visits organized among others by the WEA, the Board of Continuing Education, Cambridge Regional College, Anglia Polytechnic University, the University of the Third Age, the Open University, and branches of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies.
Work continued on A Museum for All, the innovative electronic information resource based on some 300 key works in the Museum's collections. Robert Lloyd-Parry completed nearly two-thirds of the site entries and Mark Wingfield of Cipher Arts completed the design. In the course of the year, it was decided to give the site a distinctive name, PHAROS, and, with the agreement of its funders, the Heritage Lottery Fund (Museums and Galleries Access Fund) to launch it to co-incide with the re-opening of the Museum in 2004.
In spite of the reduction in the number of galleries open to the public, there was little or no diminution in the level of activity. The Founder's Building proved to be as popular as ever as a venue for concerts and social events, as well as for gallery talks and guided tours. The inaugural reception for the University's Art History Summer School and an evening reception for Alumni Weekend have become regular features, each attracting up to 400 guests. In November the Gates Scholars attended a reception which we hope will become an annual fixture in their calendar and ours, and we were particularly gratified that the Mayor of Cambridge chose the Museum for the second year in succession as the venue for a civic reception. Cambridge Summer Recitals organized five promenade concerts during July and August and Cambridge Voices made a welcome return for their annual Christmas concert which was, as usual, sold out. Among the musical events which took place in the spring, one deserves particular mention: In May, Patricia Wilson organized a concert in honour of her husband Sir James Mirrlees, economist and Nobel laureate, which featured works commissioned for the occasion from Sir Peter Maxwell-Davies, Alexander Goehr, Edward McGuire, and John Woolrich.
It is surely appropriate that in a period of restricted physical access, the Museum has gone to great lengths to develop electronic access to the collections. By the end of the year, details of some 80,000 objects were available on the internet, with some 25,000 images, via our Online Public Access Catalogue. Our redesigned website http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/ was launched in February 2002. It is more image-rich and meets W3C accessibility standards. It received 2,777,489 hits during the year and is accessed by some 12,885 visitors per day for an average time of between 5 and 10 minutes per visit.
We are pleased to report that on the recommendation of the Faculty Board of Architecture and History of Art, the General Board approved the Diploma in the Conservation of Easel Paintings as a University award with effect from 1 October 2002. This will not only improve the chances of external funding for students at the Institute but it will achieve equality of status for their qualifications with those awarded on completion of comparable courses by other universities.
Although work was completed on the Thornham Parva retable, it was not returned to the parish church in Suffolk until arrangements were completed there for its re-installation early in 2003. Meanwhile work continued on that other important, albeit fragmented, medieval panel painting, the retable from Westminster Abbey.
The Institute completed the conservation and restoration of the full-length portraits of Henry VIII from Petworth House (National Trust) and from Trinity College for the Henry Revealed exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery. The work was largely undertaken by Jenny Rose and Helen Brett, the Mellon Fellow in the Conservation of British Paintings.
The Director and his colleagues carried out a wide range of activities at the Institute and elsewhere. In addition to maintaining their research, teaching, and studio practice, they attended conferences and symposia and undertook in situ treatments elsewhere. In September, Kate Fletcher ended her work as a contract conservator prior to moving to Australia; we take this opportunity to thank her for her valuable contribution to both practice and teaching at the Institute.
Finally, we record our thanks to the Getty Grant Program for a grant of £40,400 towards the cost of purchasing an operation miscroscope and other equipment.
In many ways the year under review may be described as one of transition, in which the Museum moved visibly towards the objectives which were identified five years ago in the Long Range Plan. Bearing in mind the changes which have already taken place and those we envisage as the Museum continues to develop its potential both as a university museum and as the leading art museum in the East of England, we encouraged the Director and staff to plan accordingly. We were gratified to learn in the course of the year that there was considerable support elsewhere in the region for the involvement of Cambridge University's museums in a regional consortium. We also agreed that it was appropriate for the Fitzwilliam Museum to lead on behalf of the University and accordingly this Museum was named along with the Norfolk County Museums Service, Colchester, and Luton as partners in the regional hub which will bid to Resource, the Council for Museums, Libraries and Archives for recurrent funding for regional developments.
Internally, we have given careful consideration to the management of the Museum and in the light of the Director's recommendations, in July 2002 we proposed the creation of three sections within the Museum in order to bring together the curatorial departments, conservation, and public services. We do not pretend that any one model is perfect, but we believe that by encouraging staff to work together in cognate areas, the new structure will enable each section to be more strategic in its planning, more efficient in the deployment of time and resources and more effective in the delivery of services.
It is fitting in a report which covers a year of unusual activity and demands upon the goodwill of so many members of staff, to end by thanking all of those throughout the Museum, whose efforts have enabled us to move forward in a measured and effective way.
| ANNE LONSDALE (Chairman) | CAROLINE ELAM | JEAN MICHEL MASSING |
| PATRICK BATESON | DEBORAH HOWARD | JOHN PORTEOUS |
| JOHN BOYD | CAROLINE HUMPHREY | VERONICA SUTHERLAND |
| JOHN BROWN | JOHN KEATLEY | JOANNA WOMACK |
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Cambridge University Reporter, 8 August 2003
Copyright © 2003 The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars
of the University of Cambridge.