England Guide
East Anglia
The Fitzwilliam Museum
Opening time: Tues– Sat 10am–5pm, Sun noon–5pm
Price: Free
Address: Trumpington Street
Website: www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
The Fitzwilliam Museum stands head and shoulders above every other museum in Cambridge. The building itself is an interpretation of Neoclassicism, built in the mid-nineteenth century to house the vast collection bequeathed by Viscount Fitzwilliam in 1816. Since then, the museum has been gifted a string of private collections, most of which are focused on a particular specialism, and consequently depicts the changing tastes of the British upper class. The Lower Galleries contain a wealth of antiquities including Egyptian sarcophagi and mummies, fifth-century BC black-and-red-figure Greek vases, plus a bewildering display of early European ceramics. There are also sections dedicated to armour, glass and pewterware, medals, portrait miniatures and illuminated manuscripts, as well as to Far Eastern applied arts and Korean ceramics.
The Upper Galleries concentrate on painting and sculpture, with an eclectic assortment of mostly nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European paintings. There are two rooms of French paintings – Monet, Renoir and Degas, among others, are represented – and two rooms of Italian works by the likes of Fra Filippo Lippi, Titian and Veronese. Two rooms feature British canvases by William Blake, Constable, Hogarth, and Gainsborough. The Dutch rooms display paintings by Frans Hals and Ruisdael. The twentieth-century gallery is packed with Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth.