Fitzwilliam Museum

“ FITZWILLIAM, RICHARD, seventh Viscount Fitzwilliam of Meryon (1745–1816) , founder of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, eldest son of Richard, sixth viscount, and Catharine, eldest daughter and coheiress of Sir Matthew Decker, bart., of Richmond, Surrey, was descended from a member of the English family of Fitzwilliam, who, attending Prince John to Ireland on his appointment to the office of chief governor, founded the branch which flourished in that kingdom till the early part of the present century. ”

“ Within any reasonable limit it is impossible top sketch as many-sided activities. During later years, apart from the duties of his office, he took—as he always had taken—much interest in the museums and in the numerous new buildings which have arisen on both sides of Downing-street. He also gave much of his time to Fitzwilliam Museum, but perhaps he devoted himself most fully of all to the university Library. ”

“ The first is a pencil-drawing of FitzGerald’s yacht; the second, a book, “made up,” like so many others, by FitzGerald, and comprising this one, three French plays, a privately printed article on Moore, and the first edition of ‘A Little Dinner at Timmins’s.’ Then with Mr Barrett, the Ipswich bookseller, who likewise knew FitzGerald, I had two chance meetings; and last but not least, I spent a most pleasant day at Colchester with Mr Frederick Spalding, curator now of the museum there. ”

“ Following the long lane which ascends between a wing of the palace and its garden wall, Narcisse and Pierre at last reached the Museum of Antiquities. Ah! what a museum it is, with galleries innumerable, a museum compounded of three museums, the Pio-Clementino, Chiaramonti, and the Braccio-Nuovo, and containing a whole world found beneath the soil, then exhumed, and now glorified in full sunlight. For more than two hours Pierre went from one hall to another, dazzled by the masterpieces, bewildered by the accumulation of genius and beauty. ”

“ FITZWILLIAM COLLECTION, THE. In the year 1816 Viscount Fitzwilliam died, leaving to the University of Cambridge, of which he was a member, the annual interest on £100,000 in money, and a large number of valuable paintings, books, engravings, and other works of art. Of these a collection of MS. music forms a portion. ”

“ Year after year and age after age it accumulates—this evidence and monument of intellectual activity—piling itself up in vast collections, which it needs a lifetime even to catalogue, and through which the uncultured walk as the idle do through the British Museum, with no very strong indignation against Omar who burned the library at Alexandria. ”

“ In “biscuit,” figures, busts, and groups, as well as vases, of which splendid examples belong to Earl Fitzwilliam, were produced. Among other specimens that have come under my notice are a Swiss boy and girl, a fine bust of Earl Fitzwilliam, Chantrey’s sleeping child, Chantrey’s full-length statue of Lady Russell, &c.
Among the artists employed at the Rockingham works it will only be necessary to name a few. These were Collinson, who [515] painted flowers; Llandig, who was a charming fruit and flower painter ”

“ In April, 1609, the death of John, Lord Lumley, without issue, enabled the Prince to gratify his love of books by purchasing a Library which probably was more valuable than any other collection then existing in England, with the exception of that of Sir Robert Cotton.
Thirty years before, Lord Lumley had inherited the fine library of his father-in-law, Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, who had been a collector of choice manuscripts at a time when the reckless dispersion of monastic treasures impoverished the nation, but gave, here and there, golden opportunities to openhanded private men. ”

“ THOUGH the natural-history portion of the Marshlands Museum grew so rapidly that it threatened to overflow the cabinet, there were very few antiquities in the collection, a Roman lamp, an Egyptian scarab, a few old coins, and a Georgian snuff-box making up the whole of the scanty store.
"I wish we could get a few really ancient things," said Cathy one day, as she dusted and tidied the shelves. "Arrow-heads, I mean, and spindle-whorls, and bronze brooches, and all those delightful finds you hear of people digging up out of barrows. ”

“ When we entered the Museo, we found a little old man, gentle, grave, and unobtrusive, varnishing the ugly portrait of some Signor of the cinquecento. Round the walls hung pictures, of mediocre value, in dingy frames; but all of them bore sounding titles. Titians, Lionardos, Guido Renis, and Luinis, looked down and waited for a purchaser. In truth this museum was a bric-à-brac shop of a sort that is common enough in Italy, where treasures of old lace, glass, armour, furniture, and tapestry, may still be met with. ”

“ A great museum in the present state of the public mind is simply an exhibition of the possible modes of doing wrong in art, and an accumulation of uselessly multiplied ugliness in misunderstood nature. Our own museum [Pg 127] at Oxford is full of distorted skulls, and your Sheffield ironwork department will necessarily contain the most barbarous abortions that human rudeness has ever produced with human fingers. The capitals of the iron shafts in any railway station, for instance, are things to make a man wish—for shame of his species—that he had been born a dog or a bee. ”

“ What have we to do with the arms and banners of the tourneys? At most we may rub the cobwebs away and shake off the dust and lay them aside in a museum." [73]
To come out of the Museo, that graveyard of dead beauty, of forgotten enthusiasms, into the quiet, deserted Piazza di S. Francesco, where the summer sleeps ever in the sun and no footstep save a foreigner's ever seems to pass, is to fall from one dream into another, not less mysterious and full of beauty. How quiet now is this old city that once rang with the shouts of the victors home from some sea fight, or returned from the Giuoco. ”

“ The artistic excellencies of these relics of a remote civilisation have been so frequently explained to the public, and their beauties are so generally felt, that it suffices to introduce the general visitor to the room, and to guide him about it, without bidding him halt to learn the estimation set upon these works by great art authorities. After he has received the natural impression which these works cannot fail to produce on his mind, he may wish to know something of the times and men which these represent; he may be glad to learn so much as is known of Phidias. ”

“ On the contrary, as a repository for stray objects, a museum is not to be expected to have a complete series of original antiquities in any class, nor is it the business of the curator to attempt to fill up the gaps without thought of the consequences. ”

“ The want of a collection of the early antiquities of this country has long been the greatest reproach which foreigners have been able to make against the British Museum. An opportunity of removing this has lately presented itself by an offer to the trustees of the well-known and probably unique collection, The Faussett Museum. ”

“ It has been, and doubtless for some centuries to come will be, a matter of regret that the unrivalled collection called the British Museum has not, after the incalculable labour bestowed, and the vast sums of money spent upon it, found a home more worthy of its invaluable contents than the present building. Of this huge pile—an irregular oblong—but little appeals to the eye, less to the power of discussion. The Eastern and Western Wings still remain partially exposed to view in all their normal hideousness of yellow brick, unadorned by aught save a few meagre mouldings. ”

“ No other qualities can possibly atone for defects of lighting in a museum. No building with a bad light can be called properly a museum; it may be an architect’s triumph, a civic ornament, a costly patchwork, a marvel of folly, but a museum it is not, if it is unfit for the first requirements of a collection. ”

“ It is never under any circumstances, however, justifiable to treat an object of art and one worthy of a place in a museum as though it were a part of the decoration of the museum. It may by its nature be a decoration to the room, but it must be so arranged that for light and for space and for general effect it is shown to its best advantage. To cut a piece of sculpture, a painting or a tapestry, as a layman might do, to make it fit a given spot in a museum is to commit a crime. ”

“ In fact, to produce the desired effect everything in the room, with very few exceptions, would have to be a replica. To sit in this room full of antiques in a frock-coat would be as bad a breach of good taste as the placing of a Victorian chandelier in an Elizabethan banqueting-hall. To furnish the room with genuine antiquities because they are old and therefore interesting would be to carry the museum spirit into daily life with its attending responsibilities, and would involve all manner of incongruities and inconsistencies ”

“ So much the better for the student of antiquities, for, without denying that museums are eminently useful, it is certain that they deprive objects of a great deal of their interest and their power of suggesting ideas by detaching them from their surroundings. Moreover, it is not at all sure that these things, when they have been bought up and carried away, will ever be put in a place where anybody can see them who may have the wish to do so. And then, when a thing has been put into a museum, it becomes such labour and painfulness to look for it; and most of us are so lazy by nature. ”

“ By and by, when the whirligig of time has brought on another revenge, the museum itself becomes a dust-heap, and remains so till after long ages it is rediscovered, and valued as belonging to a neo-rubbish age—containing, perhaps, traces of a still older paleo-rubbish civilization. ”

“ But to ensure the fullest knowledge, and the most complete preservation of things, in the long run, should be the real aim. To raid the whole of past ages, and put all that we think effective into museums, is only to ensure that such things will perish in course of time. A museum is only a temporary place. There is not one storehouse in the world that has lasted a couple of thousand years. Only two or three bronze statues have come down to us from classical times preserved by each generation. ”

“ In a museum the collection is the essential; the building is the mere accident of the surroundings of the collection, and it should completely conform to all the requirements. Yet can it be believed that, even in the last year or two, enormous national museums—as at Cairo and131 Brussels—have been built without the smallest regard to the collection, or the opinions of the curators? The result at Cairo is the most deplorable sacrifice of the art and history of a great country to the follies and childish vanity of an incompetent and unsympathetic architect. ”

“ She had sunk into her great armchair, and was weeping hot tears.
Ten minutes later, M. Charnot and Jeanne entered with me into the jealously guarded museum.
Museum was the only name to give to a collection of such artistic value, occupying, as it did, the whole of the ground floor to the right of the hall. Two rooms ran parallel to each other, filled with pictures, medals, and engravings, and were connected by a narrow gallery devoted to sculpture. ”

“ This report and those which followed bore witness that a new enthusiasm had arisen in England for recovering its lost arts; but they increasingly proved also that the collections evoked from their hiding-places were already overflowing Marlborough House. In one sense this overflowing was of signal advantage, for it enabled the department to send a collection of four hundred beautiful specimens as a circulating museum through the provincial cities and towns—a plan which has been maintained by the museum, and also by the National Gallery of Fine Arts, with excellent results. ”

“ The wholesale exhibition of one class of objects leads to two things: a false impression on the part of the public as to the importance of that particular thing in the daily life of the people of ancient times, and a fatigue of mind and eye which must be avoided if the public is to benefit from the collection. To the great mass of museum visitors the exact position of a handle on a cup or the precise number of geometrical figures used in a design are of no possible interest. ”

“ George intend taking shillings at the doors.
Nevertheless, the impression on the mind of the Sheffield journalist that museums are to be opened as lively places of entertainment, rivals for public patronage, and that their most proper position is therefore in a public thoroughfare, deserves on St. George’s part some careful answer. A museum is, be it first observed, primarily, not at all a place of entertainment, but a [313] place of Education. And a museum is, be it secondly observed, not a place for elementary education, but for that of already far-advanced scholars. ”

“ The size of the rooms gives ample space for the public exhibition of Antiquities, including statues, not much less than life-size, if necessary; whilst the galleries, though lofty, will not dwarf them. Competent critics have pronounced that it is a mistake to suppose that all sculptures look better in magnificent rooms. The solidity of the Museum building, throughout, leaves no doubt of its upper floor being strong enough to receive ordinary marble statues, not to speak of busts and smaller objects. ”

“ Some collections, originally received as loans, it is pretty certain will never be removed; and I am assured by the director that the museum has been notified of being remembered in many wills. This gentleman, Sir Philip Cunliffe Owen, and his predecessor, Sir Henry Cole, said to me, in conversation about the prospect of building museums in the American cities, that they had no doubt such institutions, if good and safe buildings were erected, would there as well as here find themselves centres of gravitation for the art treasures and curiosities owned by the community around them. ”