Annual Report of the Fitzwilliam Museum for the academical year 2002-03

The FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM SYNDICATE beg leave to present their one hundred and fifty-fourth Annual Report to the Council:

This Report covers the period August 2002 to July 2003, a year which, like its predecessor, was dominated by the Courtyard Development. In August, only a steel skeleton defined the new building in the courtyard; by the end of April construction was sufficiently far advanced for the Vice-Chancellor to perform the topping-out ceremony. Throughout the year, the twentieth-century extensions to the Museum remained closed to the public, although every effort was made to maintain curatorial services and access, necessarily limited, to the collections in the interests of research and teaching. At the same time the Founder's Building served, as it did before the Marlay wing was added, for the entire Museum. All five of the antiquities galleries downstairs were opened during advertised hours, along with the five upstairs galleries which were re-hung to display as many works of art as possible from the Founder's and subsequent collections. We recorded 130,173 visitors during the year, including 11,152 who came to the Museum in school parties. While the overall attendance figure is, for obvious reasons, lower than that recorded during the last year of full opening, it is interesting to compare it with the figure of 44,209 visitors in 1923, immediately prior to the opening of the first of the extensions, the Marlay Galleries.

Staff

In the spring Robin Crighton announced his intention to retire on 30 September 2003. He duly left after serving as Keeper of Applied Arts since 1974 and additionally as Deputy Director since 1995. We thank him for his years of loyal service and for his efforts on behalf of the Museum.

In October John Self was appointed to the new post of Buildings Manager and in January we were able to appoint David Scruton as Documentation Manager, a post supported by the Designation Challenge Fund. Further contributions from that and other external sources enabled the Museum to employ a number of Documentation Assistants both full-time and part-time. It is inevitable that staff turnover is relatively high in what are essentially temporary appointments. Nonetheless, we remain grateful to a succession of hard-working young scholars, each one of whom has made a measurable contribution to the gathering and recording of information about the collections. Thanks to shared funding from the Newton Trust for five years we were able to appoint Jo Dillon, formerly Metals Conservator, to the new post of Objects Conservator.

Finance

In the year under review, funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board amounted to £948,128, which represented 44% of income. With a smaller museum, an off-site museum shop, and no café, income from trading and the collecting boxes naturally fell to account for less than 5%. Of the remainder, grants and donations contributed just over £400,000, endowment income added a further £280,634, and the University's contribution from the Chest made up the balance with £375,269, or 17% of the total.

Among the grants we received we are particularly grateful to the City of Cambridge for continuing to support the Museum in what are difficult times for local authorities. We set great store by the partnerships we enjoy throughout the region and look forward to the day when additional resources will enable us to extend them further. The advent of a regional 'hub' for museums in the east of England, funded by the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport through the Museums Libraries and Archives Council, augurs well for these aspirations. The Museum, in the person of Margaret Greeves, Assistant Director, Central Services, played an active role in preparing the ground for the new framework, and although the level of funding will be relatively modest at first, from next year onwards we expect to see a return on the time, effort, and commitment we have invested. Meanwhile, the award of £100,025 from the Designation Challenge Fund announced last year has enabled the vital work of documentation to continue, with the added dimension of public access. The value of this contribution, together with those made by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is described further below.

During the year, every aspect of the Museum's activities benefited from the generosity of our public and private supporters. Once again, the costs associated with the Development Office were borne by the Fitzwilliam Museum Trust. The Department of Antiquities acknowledges the support of the Costakis and Leto Severis Foundation, and the Worshipful Company of Grocers. The Charlotte Bonham-Carter Charitable Trust made a grant to cover the cost of conserving one of the University's oldest chattels, the pre-Reformation hearse-cloth of Henry VII. The Department of Coins and Medals benefited once again from the generosity of the Honorary Keeper, Professor Grierson, the former Keeper, Professor Ted Buttrey, and Mr Christopher Jeeps. The impressive level of research associated with the Department was sustained by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the British Academy, Gonville and Caius College, the Robinson Charitable Trust, and the Fondation Wiener-Anspach. Professor James Marrow, Honorary Keeper of Flemish Manuscripts, Dr Emily Marrow, and the Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Fund continued to support the work of the Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books, which also benefited from grants from AHRB Resource Enhancement. The work of the Education Department was made possible by grants from Cambridgeshire County Council, South Cambridgeshire District Council, the Department for Education and Skills, the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Museums and Galleries Access Fund of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the R. K. Charitable Trust, the East of England Museums Archives and Libraries Council, Toshiba of Europe Ltd, and Trinity College Cambridge.

Acquisitions

We are pleased to report the allocation to the Museum of the painting on panel of The dead Christ supported by angels by Liberale da Verona (c. 1445-1527/9), which had been lent to the Museum by the previous owner. After being accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax on the estate of the late Myril Pouncey, it was allocated in accordance with her wishes. Other bequests received during the year included a painting of Shipwreck by Ludolf Backhuysen (c. 1631-1708) from the late Mrs G. A. Rooke and a botanical watercolour by John Nash (1893-1977) from the late Mrs B. J. H. Langston. The late Mrs E. R. Lavender bequeathed a Portrait of a woman in coloured chalks by Hugh Douglas Hamilton (c. 1740-1808) and a watercolour On the Thames by William Callow (1812-1908). To the late Dr T. D. Kellaway we are indebted for eight woodblock prints by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-92), a Japanese bronze figure group of a Samurai and Captive, c. 1880, and, among other items, eight examples of the ceramics of Alan Spencer Green (1932-2003). The late Pamela Hughes, fondly remembered as a stalwart of the Cambridge Drawing Society, and her executors added to our collection of twentieth-century private press books, illustrated books, and limited editions, as did the executors of the late Professor Frank Thistlethwaite.

We are particularly grateful to the Morton family for offering as gifts two schist sculptures from Gandhara (second to third century AD), a Seated Buddha and a Seated Boddhisatva, in memory of Harold Hargreaves and his daughters Mary Morton and Elizabeth Capstick. They strengthen significantly our holdings of ancient art from the Indian subcontinent. To Mrs P. M. Caesar we owe the clay brick bearing a cuneiform inscription which was given to her father in the 1930s by a member of Sir Leonard Woolley's expedition to the excavations at Ur. Miss V. Sheldrake donated a small group of Egyptian antiquities, including three oil lamps, acquired in that country in the 1920s, together with more modern examples of similar wares and an earthenware Staffordshire jug, 1930s, in the Egyptian style. To Ann Harris, Kerstin Stempel, and Mary Sutherland, the daughters of Sir Gordon and Lady Sutherland, we are grateful for the gift in their parents' memory of six ceramic pieces including a Persian jug from the first millennium BC, an Early Iron Age terracotta horse from Cyprus, and a Kangxi porcelain bowl. Mrs Elizabeth Ruhlmann kindly gave a Flora Danica dessert plate, Copenhagen c. 1890-94, and six drawings by Albert Moore (1841-93).

As usual Professors Grierson and Buttrey led the group of regular donors to the Department of Coins and Medals which includes Mr C. Jeeps, Mr R. Tye, and Mr and Mrs Marcus Phillips. One of the more unusual acquisitions for that Department was the hoard of coins which was discovered on 10 October 2000 during excavations in Chesterton Lane. From the coins themselves and other archaeological evidence, it is possible to determine that they were hidden in a building on the site, c. 1355. Thanks to all of the interested parties, including the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, the local authorities, and Magdalene College, the hoard was presented to the Museum in 2002.

Gifts of works on paper received during the year included a drawing by Alessandro Magnasco (1667-1749) and another by Polidoro da Caravaggio (c. 1499-1543), presented by Mark Fisch through Cambridge in America. We thank Mr and Mrs Nicholas Turner for the gift of a drawing of King David by Tommaso Minardi (1787-1871) and the family and executors of the late Peter and Mari Bicknell for the watercolour given in their memory of a View from the top of Cader Idris, Wales, by John Varley (1778-1842). To Israel Goldman, David Scrase, and the Wilkin family we are grateful for gifts of Japanese prints. The artist Peter Coker gave a copy of his Parisian Suite, 2002, a portfolio of ten prints, together with two lithographs associated with the series, and we accepted the generous offer of the Print Studio, Cambridge, to deposit at the Museum an archive impression of every print made there. We were pleased to receive from the Ralph Maynard Smith Trust three examples of the late artist's work and from the Executors of the late Nerys Johnson, three of her gouaches and two sketchbooks of flowers. Finally, we note with appreciation the gifts of two plates from Filippo Morghen's (1730-after 1807) Raccolta delle cose più notabili veduta dal cavaliere Wilde Scull, e dal sigr: de la Hire nel lor famoso viaggio dalla terra alla Luna [sic] … (editions of 1766-68), given by David Scrase in memory of his aunt, Mrs G. Walker and an artist's proof of Jane Joseph's (b.1942) aquatint Boulder, 2002, given by Craig Hartley in memory of his father, Cyril Hartley.

Gifts of contemporary applied arts continued unabated from Nicholas and Judith Goodison, ranging from Philip Eglin's (b. 1959) hand-built porcelain Popular Madonna and Julian Stair's (b. 1955) teapot and two cups with ground (a rectangular tray) in stoneware, to glass by Sally Fawkes (b. 1968) and Naoko Sato (b. 1964).

Throughout the year, the Friends of the Fitzwilliam acquired a wide range of objects which were then offered to the Museum as gifts. They include the terracotta flask with the figure of the monster Scylla in relief on both sides which was made in Canosa, Italy, c. 300-250 BC; a print by Federico Barocci (c. 1535-1612) of the Madonna and Child; a Qing Dynasty export-trade plate, c. 1745, depicting a country house; three twentieth-century medals; a Boat Race Bowl designed by Eric Ravilious (1903-42) and manufactured in Queen's ware by Wedgwood in 1938; and a copy (numbered 4 out of 12) of A Little Flora of Common Plants by Jane Joseph and Mel Gooding, EMH Arts, The Eagle Gallery, London, 2002.

In recent years, no Annual Report has failed to emphasize the importance of contributions made towards our acquisitions by the National Art Collections Fund. This, their centenary year, was no exception. It was marked by three outright gifts: a work in mixed media by Barbara Rae (b. 1943), Red Hill, from the Diana King Bequest; a painting of The Mill by Emile Charles Lambinet (1819-77) from the Rose Dallas Bequest; and an impression of Joe Tilson's (b. 1928) Screenprint Pythion. Month after month, grants from the NACF augmented our own modest purchase funds and enabled us to acquire works which would otherwise have been beyond our reach. This applies not only to the Samuel Palmer, for which see below, but also to: a gold shilling of Eadbald of Kent (614-40) from the Canterbury mint, c. 625; the Study for the Battle of Tunis drawn by Taddeo Zuccaro (1529-66), to which the Resource/V&A Purchase Grant Fund also made a generous contribution; Polidoro da Caravaggio's double-sided sheet of studies of 1527; a unique and unpublished portrait medal of Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford (1581-1627) by Nicholas Briot (c. 1579-1646); a collection of twenty-four woodcut prints by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-92); Frédéric Bazille's (1841-70) spectacular study in chalks and watercolours of a Black woman with peonies, 1870; and Stanley Spencer's (1891-1959) study in oils, squared for transfer, for his painting of The Centurion's Servant which he completed in 1914. It is tempting to add that this list reflects both the insistence on quality and the catholicity of taste which constitutes the common ground between our curatorial staff and the Art Advisory Committee of the NACF.

While it would not have been possible to purchase the exquisitely beautiful small landscape in oils by Samuel Palmer (1805-81) without an extremely generous grant of £360,000 voted by the East of England Regional Committee of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the narrative of that acquisition illustrates the importance of our own restricted acquisitions funds. When the painting was offered to the Museum we were able to commit towards its purchase the accumulated income from the Fairhaven Fund. (This is a restricted endowment fund created in 1948 when the first Lord Fairhaven made a gift of £30,000 to commemorate the centenary of the opening of the Museum on Trumpington Street, specifying that the income from it be used 'for the purpose of purchasing paintings and drawings of the British School of landscape paintings.' The annual income now exceeds the original capital value of Lord Fairhaven's gift.) Without that initial allocation from our own resources we would have been unable to initiate a process which resulted, after grants were made by the NACF as well as the HLF, in a major acquisition by the Museum at a direct cost of 20% of its current market value.

Exhibitions

Although we were unable to mount temporary exhibitions on a large scale within the confines of the Founder's Building, the Department of Antiquities made use of the cases in the centre of the Leventis Gallery to show Inside Bronzes: Secrets of the Sculptor's Art, featuring the materials and tools of sculpture as well as explaining some of the techniques. Similarly table cases in the upper galleries were used to show selections of prints, drawings, and manuscripts. A small display in the Entrance Hall of The Golden Jubilee: Fifty Years of the Crown (in the numismatic sense) proved to be popular.

Bearing in mind the curtailment of our own exhibitions programme, we readily acceded to the request made by the Director and Board of the Institute of Visual Culture to erect and occupy a temporary exhibition space on the north lawn during 2002-03. As hosts, we agreed to provide electricity and security cover free of charge to the Institute. Artistic direction remained firmly in their hands. The temporary gallery opened rather later than was envisaged with an exhibition devoted to the work of Angela Bulloch (September-October). Stephen Willatts: Cognition Control followed (October-November), then Philippe Parenno and Pierre Huyghe: No Ghost Just a Shell (December-January), On General Release (February-March), and Tom Burr: The Screens (April-May). Because if it's not love, then it's the bomb that will bring us together opened in July.

While we do not have attendance figures for the exhibitions organized and presented by the Institute, there was added value for visitors to the Museum in its coffee bar, which proved to be especially popular during the warmer months when tables and chairs were put outside.

Loans

In our last Report, we detailed efforts to lend to other museums and galleries works of art which might otherwise have been consigned to storage during the Courtyard Development. These arrangements held throughout the year with relevant works from our collections on view at the National Gallery; the Tate Gallery; Dudley Museum and Art Gallery; Gainsborough's House, Sudbury; Abbot Hall, Kendal; the National Horseracing Museum, Newmarket; and The National Trust at Oxburgh and Wimpole. Further works remained in suitably secure but visible locations around the University and the Colleges.

Although we announced more than a year ago that loans from the collection would be restricted at a time when building works made it difficult to service them effectively, the Museum was able to comply with a number of requests. In all, some 93 objects travelled to some 49 venues, worldwide.

In the course of the year we were pleased to receive on extended loan a number of items, including the sizeable collection of coins, medals, and tokens belonging to Queens' College. To the Costakis and Leto Severis Foundation we are grateful for the loan of fifteen Cypriot antiquities for display alongside our own and in April we were pleased to accommodate on loan the magnificent illuminated manuscript Bible, mid-thirteenth-century French, from Elton Hall.

Academic activities

A detailed report on Teaching Activities, 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-five 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 were no less active externally, lecturing at other universities and colleges, as well as to various branches of NADFAS and U3A. In addition to supervising undergraduates and research students, eight members of staff served as assessors and examiners in this University and elsewhere.

Publications by members of staff reflected both their research interests and the international context in which they operate; their contributions appeared in many of the leading journals as well as in more specialized publications in Japan, North America, Romania, and Russia.

Regional activities

We reported last year that the Fitzwilliam Museum had been named along with the Norfolk County Museums Service, Colchester Museum, and Luton Museum as a partner in the East of England 'hub' established by Resource: the Council for Museums, Archives, and Libraries, under the 'Renaissance in the Regions' initiative. We have seized this opportunity both to recognize the Fitzwilliam's position as the leading art museum in the region and, on behalf of the University's other museums, to enable them, in so far as they consider it appropriate, to operate regionally as the 'engines of scholarship' identified in the Renaissance report. The East of England hub was not among those included in phase one of the scheme which were eligible for full funding in the current year. However, we were pleased to learn that it was awarded £1.24 million in May 2003 for the period 2003-06, during which the emphasis will be upon capacity building among the partner institutions, and developing a comprehensive museums education service for schools. We welcome our growing involvement with other museums and galleries in the region and with the regional agency, the East of England Museums, Libraries, and Archives Council, and while we recognize the need for more substantial Government funding if the scheme is to realize its potential, we are persuaded that this Museum has an important part to play in the future as a partner and a provider of museum services in the region.

Education

Undaunted by the closure of more than half the galleries, the Department of Education maintained a full programme of events throughout the year. Art in Context, a weekly series of lunch-time gallery talks attracted between 60 and 80 visitors on a regular basis. In May, to mark Museums and Galleries Month the Museum offered four lectures on Second Hand Goods, in which the themes of revival and re-interpretation were examined across a wide range of objects from different cultures. Less formally, the Department organized two series of 'Drop-In Sessions', the first of which co-incided with Adult Learners' Week in May, to encourage visitors to engage in discussion in front of specific works of art. For those wishing to express their views in writing, Simon Miles led a four-session course on 'The Art of Description' during February which was so successful that it resulted in two further creative writing courses being offered later in the year. Gallery sessions for schools continued, albeit on a reduced basis, throughout the year. A grant from the Department for Education and Skills under the Museum and Gallery Education Programme enabled the Museum to work with the Faculty of Education and years 5 and 6 at Brampton Junior School to develop an interactive website for children linking science and technology to the study of ancient objects. In conjunction with the Cambridge Music Festival, the Department collaborated with the Mobius Ensemble to explore 'Impressionism off the Wall' with groups of year 10 students studying for the GCSE in Music. Several initiatives were taken during the year to target new visitors. Among these 'Art into Literacy', a collaboration with the Basic Skills Academy at Cambridge Regional College, attracted widespread attention, especially when a booklet of the participants' writings appeared in the autumn. We are grateful to Sue Street, Permanent Secretary at the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport for making the presentations at a ceremony to mark the successful completion of the course. In collaboration with Kettle's Yard, the staff of Willow Walk Hostel, and Victoria Road Hostel, the Department ran a series of day events for homeless people. Towards the end of the year, our staff welcomed an approach by the local Alzheimer's Society, as a result of which discussion sessions in the galleries were scheduled. At the same time the possibility of future collaborations with Addenbrooke's and Fulbourn hospitals were explored with a view to developing programmes appropriate to patients' care plans. Finally, we welcomed yet another ground-breaking development in conjunction with a number of agencies which care for people with mental health problems. All of these initiatives involve challenges as well as opportunities; it says a great deal for the dedication of Frances Sword and her team that they have devoted time, energy, and imagination to the extension of our services.

Documentation and access to Collections Information

Last year we reported the award of £100,025 from the Designation Challenge Fund administered by Resource, the Museums, Libraries, and Archives Council. This enabled the Museum to retain experienced staff and to create the post of Documentation Manager referred to above. With its emphasis on 'Access to Collections Information', it also resulted in a formal link to Pharos, our electronic information resource which will be launched to co-incide with the re-opening of the Museum in 2004. That in turn has informed our plans to introduce hand-held audio guides to the collections. A grant from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) has enabled us to produce an Introductory tour of the Museum which will be available on Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), combining sound, text, and images, from June 2004 onwards. We are also pleased to announce funding from the HEFCE through the JISC Focus on Access to Information Resources which provides £194,165 over two years to deliver 100,000 object records as metadata to the Arts and Humanities Data Service. We are collaborating actively with other museums in a trial with the 24-hour Museum to disseminate both records and images more widely.

Following the improvements to the website which we reported last year, there has been a further increase in its use. During the year, 6.6 million hits were recorded, 2,524,571 of them in the final quarter, April to June; just slightly fewer than the number recorded for the entire year 2001-02. After the main Museum Web page the Online Public Access Catalogue was the most visited page resulting in some 240,633 searches during the same quarter. It is a measure of the success of our efforts to provide electronic access that Resource invited the Assistant Director, Central Services, to make a contribution to the Minerva European Conference on 'Quality for Cultural Websites' in Parma in November 2003.

Hamilton Kerr Institute

In last year's Report, we expressed our growing concern about the short-fall in endowment income with which to sustain the Institute's core activities or research, treatments, and teaching. This has become a perennial problem, which we hope will be addressed once the University has applied the Resource Allocation Model to the Museum and its Departments. Meanwhile, work undertaken for our external clients including the Church Commissioners, the National Trust, and the Royal Collection provides a vital source of additional income as well as the opportunity to work on paintings of the highest quality from a wide variety of sources.

On 23 January, the fourteenth-century retable was returned to the parish church of Thornham Parva, Suffolk, where it has been located since its discovery in 1927. Its conservation, which took approximately 5,300 hours of work, carried out over a ten-year period, attracted appreciative and widespread attention in the press. (A monograph detailing its history and conservation will be published in 2004.) Simultaneously, work continued on another major panel painting which survives from the same period, the retable from Westminster Abbey. We are grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund for augmenting their grant to meet the increased costs of this on-going project which involves research into the materials as well as the methods of medieval art. In the course of the year, two versions of the Adoration of the Magi, from Petworth House and Upton House respectively, both painted by Hieronymus Bosch, were cleaned and restored, side by side, before being shown at the National Gallery in the exhibition of Bosch to Brueghel. Work also began on a group of eighteenth-century British paintings from the collection formed at the instigation of William Hogarth at the Foundling Hospital, London.

The partial closure of the Museum provided an ideal opportunity to carry out treatments on a number of paintings which are normally on display including Murillo's Vision of Fray Lauterio and the painting of The Road to Calvary by Sanchez. We are delighted to acknowledge the generosity of Mrs Florian Carr in response to an article which appeared in The Times highlighting the acute shortage of funds for the Museum's conservation programme. Thanks to her gift of £28,000 it was possible to undertake the treatment of the fifteenth-century triptych illustrating Scenes from the Life of the Virgin, a process complicated by the fact that in the nineteenth-century the panels on which they are painted were drastically reduced in thickness.

Finally, we are pleased to report that two students completed the Diploma course in July; the first to do so under the new regulations by which the University makes the award. One of them, Lara Wilson has taken up an internship at the State Russian Museum and the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and the other, Hayley Woodhouse, has been offered an internship at the Officio delle Pietro Dure in Florence.

Conclusion

While contractors' huts in the forecourt and a crane overhead provided visible signs throughout the year of the progress which was being made with the Courtyard Development, it is important to acknowledge the work of the Museum's staff behind the scenes which was of no less consequence for the future. We have referred above to some of the changes and innovations which will become apparent when the Museum re-opens fully in the summer of 2004 to provide better physical and intellectual access to the collections and a wider range of services to all our users. We look forward eagerly to the end of next year, but in the meantime it seems fitting to end this Report with our thanks to all those who are working towards our renascence.

ANNE LONSDALE (Chairman)RICHARD CORKJEAN MICHEL MASSING
PATRICK BATESONDEBORAH HOWARDJOHN PORTEOUS
JOHN BROWNCAROLINE HUMPHREYVERONICA SUTHERLAND
PAUL CARTLEDGEJOHN KEATLEY