Back to Cambridge for some serious art travel!
I returned to the Fitzwilliam today. I had other reasons to be in Cambridge, but made sure to arrive early after last year’s visit, when relentless rain and sheer scale meant I only managed one floor.
This time, under clear skies, I could properly appreciate both the town and the building. I explored the first floor’s painting collection, having already seen the antiquities below—which are extraordinary. But the two simply can’t be done in a single visit; conceptually and physically, it’s too much.
Fortunately, it’s free, which makes returning not just possible, but part of the pleasure of museums in the UK.
Here’s a little visual survey of a few key works across centuries, exploring the depth and character of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s remarkable holdings in painting.
A friend once described Larry Rivers as the only man addicted to nicotine who didn’t smoke. Rivers responded to cigarette packets as Andy Warhol did to tins of soup. He painted them. Over and over again. When he discovered that Rembrandt’s painting, Syndics of the Drapery Guild, had been adapted to decorate packets of Dutch Masters cigars, he revelled in the conjunction of high art and mass production, and painted the boxes many times. A work of art which had become a marketing tool was recycled once more as a work of art. FWMo
The painting has an interesting history even if the precise artist is not known. I think that the distortion on Saint Christopher’s face and body is very strange and interesting. It almost looks correct yet. It also looks extremely uncorrect and it tricks the eye. It’s very strange and odd conception to portray a saint like that. I don’t think I can think of another similar example. Another thing that’s interesting is just how dapper and well-dressed the devil is. Poor old Christopher is ragged and the devil is clearly prospering.
Instead of strictly presenting the work in a linear fashion, starting with the oldest and ending with the newest, what the curators of the Fitzwilliam have done is, with a very light touch, try to conceptually theme and sprinkle paintings around to suggest ways in which the viewer can see images in relation to each other.
What’s nicest is that it’s a very light touch, and it means that every time you look over it all you’re going to find a bit of a surprise. You might find an 18th-century portrait with a Picasso, or a Joseph Wright of Derby. I mean, they don’t really connect to each other—but they absolutely do, because painting is painting and art is art, and the trajectory of art is a spiral which constantly loops back upon itself.
1626 version of The Triumph of Death attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Younger (1564–1638) is an oil-on-oak panel painting that closely follows the 1562 composition of the same name created by his father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder
THE ART TRAVELLER 