Fitzwilliam

Paid a rare visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum while in Cambridge, foodie aspects of which have already been reported on.

For a museum in a small provincial town, fairly outrageous, making, for example, the otherwise excellent museum in Exeter look very provincial. One supposes that Mr. Fitzwilliam was very rich indeed. Wikipedia suggests Irish peerage and a fortune made by speculative building in Georgian Dublin; not settlers but probably ascendancy and squeezers of the starving peasants at at most one remove. One wonders how long it will be before the Dáil Éireann wakes up to the iniquity of it all and insists on the results of the plunder being moved back to the ancestral seat at Merrion, now a suburb of Dublin.

We spent most of our time on the pictures of which there were lots, lots of them good. So, for example, a good Crivelli (see, for example, 5th May). But we failed to find 'The Roadmenders' by Manet, the parental reproduction of which now hangs in our extension, despite having thought that one of the two versions of this painting lived there. (I find subsequently that Professor Google is not very good at telling you where pictures are. He knows all about the picture and the many places which will sell me a copy but not where I can see the thing for real). On the other hand there was a nice Renoir landscape and the original of the painting of Hardy on the cover of the Tomalin biography (borrowed following the post of 20th April and of which more in due course).

Plus a fine new Poussin, 'The Last Sacrament', one of the two series of paintings of the seven (note the magic number popping up again) sacraments. No doubt we will go on a hunt to find the others at some point. In the meantime I was reminded of details in the same painter's 'Dance to the Music of Time' and in the National Gallery version of Cézanne's 'Les Grandes Baigneuses'. Small prize for readers who spot what in this last was the connection.

We noticed in passing a pot by the chap of the hare with the amber eyes, looking better in the flesh than I had thought likely from a picture of a relative (see May 28th 2012 in the other place).

We could not fail to notice the extravagant and outrageously fancy entrance hall, probably cleaned since my childhood, from which I remember it as much more dingy. Main picture gallery moderately fancy and I was pleased to find that I could walk around the gallery hung half way up it without the vertigo kicking in. The point of the gallery being to show a lot of small pictures, some very good, but which one could not get far enough away from to see properly.