Newsletter and Events Programme Spring 2020

You may have noticed a flamboyant 4 metre tall pineapple installation on the Museum’s front lawn. This specially commissioned piece by Bompas and Parr (experts in multi-sensory experience design), marks the Museum’s major exhibition for the period - Feast & Fast. This spectacular pineapple is illuminated at night, so do walk by after darkness falls. Coming under the second wave of our Sensual/Virtual umbrella, we invite you to look in reality at the evocative installations within the exhibition ranging from a European feasting table to a Jacobean sugar banquet and see how they appeal to your senses.

Sharpening Perceptions, a painting exhibition of copies made by students at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, helps us to better appreciate the virtual reality of what we see and the skill involved in imitating historic painting techniques. Sharpening Perceptions will also be the focus of The Sue and Ian Purdy Lecture with Dr Spike Bucklow of the Hamilton Kerr Institute in March. While Virtue, Vice & The Senses conjures up quite different sensations based upon the Five Senses, Seven Virtues and the Deadly Sins.

This season also sees the opening of a new schools-focussed exhibition Inspire, showcasing primary school children’s creative response to our painting of Cupid and Psyche by Jacopo del Sellaio and highlighting the importance of creative learning for young people at a time when the arts in schools are increasingly under threat. A Friends Study Morning will be taking a closer look at this engaging exhibition.

Since I arrived at the Museum in February, I have been working on The Fitzwilliam Museum Mission with the Staff and Syndics. I am looking forward to sharing this Mission more widely in 2020. To that end, in the New Year, we will be planning to launch a survey of our Friends. I do hope you will get involved and let us know your thoughts and experiences of being a Friend as we pursue our aim to be the best Museum we can be.

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Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/friends2

Friends Curatorial Morning

Seeing Sound: Music imagery and inspiration with the exhibition curators Jane Munro, Dr Rebecca Virag, and Fiona Robinson, contributing artist Thursday 9 January • 10.30 – 12.30

A last chance to enjoy a curatorial led morning, taking a closer at this exhibition which brings together a remarkable range of works from the Museum’s collections to explore the ways in which artists and composers have engaged in a dialogue between sight and sound. Artistic and musical collaborations for the stage sit alongside works that employ music making as a visual metaphor for love. Others reference music’s ability to trigger an emotional response without a visual cue. The tension between abstract and figurative, graphic and sonic, is alluded to through the display of musical scores alongside drawings and prints. The exhibition includes works by Watteau, Rossetti, Renoir and Picasso and musical manuscripts by Handel, Brahms, Stravinsky and the Founder of the Museum, Lord Fitzwilliam.

Places: 25 • Friends only Cost: £20 includes coffee, tea and cakeVenue: The Fitzwilliam Museum Meet in the Seminar Room (35) at 10.30

Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/friends 3

BOOKING FOR ALL FRIENDS EVENTS OPENS ON FRIDAY 20 DECEMBER 2019Tickets for all Friends events are available through Cambridge Live Tickets via:

www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/friends and follow the links to ‘Friends Events’. Please use booking code “FRIENDS1909”

By Phone: 01223 357 851 Mon-Sat 10.00 – 18.00 In Person: At the Cambridge Corn Exchange Mon-Fri 12.00 – 18.00, Sat 10.00 – 18.00

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Booking details on page 3 www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/friends4

Friends Study Morning

Inspire: A celebration of children’s art in response to Jacopo del Sellaio’s Cupid and Psyche with the exhibition teamThursday 13 February • 10.15 – 13.00

Over the past 12 months, hundreds of local primary school children have visited the Museumto look at the painting of Cupid and Psyche with their teachers or parents, and many thousandsmore have studied it back at school. This exhibition demonstrates the importance of giving youngpeople opportunities to look deeply and thoughtfully at objects and images and to respondcreatively through thinking, talking and making together. Modelled on the National Gallery’s‘Take One Picture’ programme, the exhibition reminds us of the importance of cultural learningin schools. In partnership with AccessArt.

Places 25 • Friends onlyCost: £20 includes coffee, tea and cake Venue: The Fitzwilliam Museum Meet in the Seminar Room (35) at 10.15

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Booking details on page 3 www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/friends 5

Welcome Coffee, Cake and Tour for New Friends Wednesday 11 March • 14.15 – 16.00

If you are new to the Friends, would like the opportunity to meet other Friends and wish to be better acquainted with The Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection of paintings, please do join us for refreshments and a guided tour through the paintings galleries, led by Sarah Burles. This tour will also feature the recently re-opened Gallery 3 after nearly two years of refurbishment.

Places: 20 • Friends onlyCost: Free, but booking essentialVenue: The Fitzwilliam Museum Arrive via the Courtyard Entrance and meet in the Friends Room

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www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/friendsBooking details on page 36

Sharpening PerceptionsWednesday 18 March • 18.00 – 20.00

Lecture 18.00 – 19.00Drinks 19.00 – 20.00

This lecture, based upon the exhibition in Gallery 14, features copies of paintings made by students at the Hamilton Kerr Institute. Towards the end of their training, students copy a painting that they are treating in the studios. The purpose of the exercise is to teach them how to examine a painting visually, discovering exactly how the painter achieved their effects. The copies are not taken to completion, so they provide a record of the painter’s process and form an accessible teaching resource for future students.

Dr Bucklow will explain why this activity is the culmination of the HKI students’ learning process, how the students engage with the painting and the works they are copying, and what can be learned beyond the exercise.

Places: 200 • Guests WelcomeCost: £10 to include a glass of wineVenue: Lecture Theatre and theatre foyer, Fitzwilliam College. Parking at Huntingdon Road and Storey’s Way entries to the college. Bus Service to Huntingdon Road from the City Centre. Please note parking is limited and available on a strictly first come, first served basis.

Copy by Anna Don of Giovanni di Paolo, St Bartholomew

The Sue and Ian Purdy Lecture with Dr Spike Bucklow of the Hamilton Kerr Institute, The Fitzwilliam Museum

www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/friendsBooking details on page 3 7

Tour of Peterhouse College and Gardens Tuesday 21 April • 11.00 – 13.30

Peterhouse is the oldest of the Cambridge colleges, founded by Hugo de Balsham, Bishop of Ely in 1284 and granted its charter by King Edward I. Peterhouse College has made its own distinctive contribution to society for over 700 years, surviving the Reformation, Civil War and the upheavals of every century since. It remains the smallest college in terms of number of Fellows and students, but as the late Noel Annan put it in his 1999 survey of the universities and society, The Dons, this small College has always had “an intellectual influence … out of all proportion to [its] size”.

The College’s remarkable continuity is reflected in the historical benefactions that underpin its life and work today. Communal life is centred on the Hall, built with the legacy of the Founder on his death in 1286; the Chapel, the creation of Matthew Wren and John Cosin in the 1600s; and the Libraries, which have built on the benefactions of Andrew Perne in the sixteenth century and of Adolphus Ward in the early twentieth.

Welcome and introduction by Peterhouse fellow, Professor Richard Holton followed by a tour with Dr Saskia Murk Jansen, Development Director, of The Combination Room, The Old Hall, The Chapel and then the grounds and courts of the College. Of course, the grounds were once much larger, before the land was earmarked by the University of Cambridge for the construction of The Fitzwilliam Museum.

Places: 25 • Friends onlyCost: £15 includes morning coffee, tea and cakeVenue Peterhouse College, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1RD Meet at the Porter’s Lodge at 11.00

M U S E U M N E W S

New Acquisitions 100% of your Friends subscription goes towards new acquisitions to continue the richness and variety of the Museum’s collections.

With your support, we have recently purchased an etching Femme dans la nuit by Jean Fautrier (1898 – 1964). The Fitzwilliam does not yet represent this painter, sculptor, designer and experimental printmaker. His print demonstrates the lyrical nature of his work: the blue ground glows like an evening sky, bringing the reclining figure into a realm of dreaminess and sensuality. The combined incisive lines and uneven, nebulous colours of Fautrier’s prints have a similar obsession with layers to Michael Taylor’s lithographs, also offered by the Friends.

In addition, the Friends have enabled the acquisition of La cathédrale engloutie (Debussy plays Debussy series), a 2018 graphite and mixed media piece by Fiona Robinson. This framed artwork is featured in the Seeing Sound exhibition and Fiona is the artist contributor to the Friends Study Morning in January, as featured on page 3.

Booking details on page 3 • www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/friends

The Fitzwilliam Museum • Trumpington Street • Cambridge • CB2 1RBTel: 01223 332933 • Email: development@fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

Data protectionWe are a department of the University of Cambridge, please read our full data protection statement at: alumni.cam.ac.uk/data-protection

Congratulations to our Egyptian Coffins teamThe Fitzwilliam Museum’s Egyptian coffins team has been awarded the prestigious Vice-Chancellor’s Research Impact and Engagement Award in the collaboration category for our outreach work on ancient Egyptian coffins. The award, which has been presented annually since 2016, recognises outstanding achievement, innovation and creativity in devising and implementing ambitious engagement and impact plans. In particular, the award recognised the project team’s major 2016 exhibition Death on the Nile: Uncovering the afterlife of ancient Egypt, and the ‘Pop-Up’ Museum project targeting underserved audiences in England and Egypt. As part of the award, the team received £1000 which was used toward co-running a coffins making workshop at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and a series of ‘Pop-Up’ Museums in Damietta, Egypt with their Egyptian Museum colleagues in November 2019.