Enfilade

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Wikimedia Commons (20 July 2016).

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As Lonnie Bunch, the MNAAHC’s director, repeatedly says, the museum aims, by addressing black experiences and contributions, to expand conceptions of what American history and identities are for all visitors. Part of that necessarily requires seventeenth- and eighteenth-century objects and interpretations. There are slave shackles, even an early nineteenth-century slave cabin, but there are also sources documenting service in the Revolutionary War, Freemasonry objects, and a portrait by Joshua Johnson, the earliest documented professional African American painter. Writing for The New York Times (15 September 2016), Holland Cotter calls it “more than just impressive. It’s a data-packed, engrossing, mood-swinging must-see.” Press release (2 February 2016) . . .

Ledger of supply costs for eleven Revolutionary War soldiers, 1782.

The Smithsonian today announced that the National Museum of African American History and Culture will open to the public Saturday, September 24. The opening will be the focus of a week-long celebration that begins with a dedication ceremony. The celebration continues with extended visiting hours and a three-day festival showcasing popular music, literature, dance and film. Also planned are events co-hosted by other museums around the country and in Africa.

“After 13 years of hard work and dedication on the part of so many, I am thrilled that we now have this good news to share with the nation and the world,” said Lonnie Bunch, the museum’s founding director. “In a few short months visitors will walk through the doors of the museum and see that it is a place for all people. We are prepared to offer exhibitions and programs to unite and capture the attention of millions of people worldwide. It will be a place for healing and reconciliation, a place where everyone can explore the story of America through the lens of the African American experience.”

“We look forward to the opening of this enormously important new museum,” said David Skorton, Smithsonian Secretary. “The National Museum of African American History and Culture furthers the Smithsonian’s commitment to telling America’s story in all its dimensions.”

President George W. Bush signed the legislation establishing the museum in 2003. In 2009, the museum’s architectural team of Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroupJJR was selected, and in 2011 Clarke/Smoot/Russell was chosen as the construction firm. David Adjaye is the lead designer, and Phil Freelon is the lead architect. The landscape design is by the team of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol.

Joshua Johnson, Portrait of John Westwood, ca. 1807–08, oil on canvas (Washington, D.C.: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2010.25ab).

The Smithsonian broke ground for the museum 22 February 2012 on its five-acre site on Constitution Avenue between 14th and 15th streets N.W. The 400,000-square-foot building has five levels above ground and four below. The museum will have exhibition galleries, an education center, a theater, café, and store, as well as staff offices. Among the building’s signature spaces are the Contemplative Court, a water- and light-filled memorial area that offers visitors a quiet space for reflection; the Central Hall, the primary public space in the museum and the point of orientation to building; and a reflecting pool at the south entry of the museum, with calm waters meant to invite all to approach.

The museum also features a series of openings—’lenses’—throughout the exhibition spaces that frame views of the Washington Monument, the White House, and other Smithsonian museums on the National Mall. These framed perspectives remind visitors that the museum presents a view of American through the lens of the African American experience.

The museum will open with 11 inaugural exhibitions that will focus on broad themes of history, culture and community. The exhibitions have been designed by museum historians in collaboration with Ralph Appelbaum Associates. These exhibitions will feature some of the more that 34,000 artifacts the museum has collected since the legislation establishing it was signed in 2003. The museum’s collections are designed to illustrate the major periods of African American history. Highlights include: a segregation-era Southern Railway car (c. 1920), Nat Turner’s Bible (c. 1830s), Michael Jackson’s fedora (c. 1992), a slave cabin from Edisto Island, S.C. plantation (c. early 1800s), Harriet Tubman’s hymnal (c. 1876) and works of art by Charles Alston, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, and Henry O. Tanner.

While under construction, the museum has had a gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Since 2009, the museum has opened seven exhibitions in the space including Through the African American Lens: Selections from the Permanent Collection (on view now), The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise, and Changing America: The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863 and The March on Washington, 1963. The museum’s first exhibition, Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Photographs, opened in 2007 at the International Center for Photography in New York and toured 15 cities.

In addition to exhibitions, the museum has also launched several education and research programs. Save Our African American Treasures was launched in Chicago in January 2008 and is one of the museum’s signature programs. Participants work with conservation specialists and historians to learn how to identify and preserve items of historical value, including photographs, jewelry, military uniforms, and textiles.

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Du Paquier Porcelain Manufactory, Elephant Wine Dispenser, ca. 1740 (New York: The Frick Collection, gift of the Melinda and Paul Sullivan Collection, 2016; photo by Michael Bodycomb).

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Press release from The Frick, via Art Daily (16 September 2016). . .

The Frick Collection announced a gift from Paul Sullivan and Trustee Melinda Martin Sullivan of porcelain produced by the Du Paquier manufactory in Vienna. The Sullivans generously permitted the Frick to choose fourteen superb examples from their collection, considered to be the finest private collection in the world from this important early Western manufactory. The objects, dating from about 1720 to 1740, perfectly complement the museum’s porcelain holdings, which have grown since Henry Clay Frick’s day to represent in depth some of the best productions of this prized material. Mr. Frick focused his porcelain collecting on Sèvres, which accompanied beautifully the eighteenth-century French paintings and furniture he acquired. In 1966, his collection of Chinese porcelain was augmented by some two hundred pieces through the bequest of his son, Childs. The museum’s holdings were again extended by recent and promised gifts of Meissen porcelain from Henry Arnhold. Now, the Sullivan’s gift of Du Paquier porcelain adds to the Frick’s already strong assemblage, which illustrates the Western fascination with Eastern models and represents the brilliant and distinctive tradition of porcelain production in Europe. Starting September 28, these stunning works will be on view in the Frick’s Reception Hall, remaining there through March of 2017.

Europe had long sought to duplicate the composition and physical qualities of the ceramics it imported from China; the feat was achieved only in the first decade of the eighteenth century at the Royal Meissen Manufactory outside Dresden, Germany, before being replicated by the Du Paquier manufactory in Vienna, then by the Sèvres manufactory in France, and elsewhere. In 1718, Claudius Innocentius du Paquier, an agent in the Imperial Council of War at the Vienna court, was granted a twenty-five year charter by Emperor Charles VI to operate a porcelain factory in Vienna. Although the secret of making porcelain by combining local clays containing kaolin with ground alabaster was jealously guarded by the Meissen manufactory, Du Paquier used his diplomatic connections to lure several key figures from Germany to Austria. These included Christoph Conrad Hunger, a porcelain painter; Just Friedrich Tiemann, an expert in kiln construction; and Samuel Stöltzel, the Meissen kiln master, who brought with him the formula for porcelain paste. Named for its founder, the Du Paquier manufactory produced a range of tablewares, decorative vases, and smallscale sculpture that found great popularity with the Hapsburg court and the Austrian nobility.

An early work of about 1725 testifies to the Viennese factory’s pride in its achievement. A tulip vase, part of a set of vessels called a garniture, features a fanciful view of Vienna and its spiritual center, St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Circling the frame of this scene is a Latin inscription that translates: “The bowls that Vienna formerly shipped here under a thousand perils of the sea, she now produces for herself.” The legend clearly signals the Du Paquier manufactory’s debt to Asian ware, which the Emperor Charles VI’s Ostend East-India Company had imported to the city since 1722.

A number of Asian motifs cover a Du Paquier tureen and stand of 1730–35, a form common in both European ceramic and silver dinner services of this period. Chinese-inspired handles in the form of leaping fish enliven the vessel. Its cobalt blue underglaze decorated with gold patterns and cherry blossoms reflect color combinations influenced by Imari ware, which was imported to Europe from Japan during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Within the fan-shaped cartouches, scenes of Chinese figures and temples have been adopted from German engravings published about 1720 in Amsterdam. The variety of sources and inventive adaptations characterize Du Paquier’s spirited production.

As the renown of the Du Paquier manufactory spread, commissions came from capitals throughout Europe; the emperor and members of his court also sent these prized objects as diplomatic gifts to their counterparts in foreign lands. A magnificent tureen—one of more than forty from an extensive service created in 1735 for Czarina Anna Ivanovna—illustrates porcelain’s role in cementing political and dynastic ties. In 1726, Austria and Russia had signed a treaty of mutual defense against military threats from the Ottoman Empire and subsequently were allies during the War of Polish Succession (1733–35). It is likely that to strengthen this alliance, Charles VI sent Anna Ivanovna the Du Paquier service, most of which is still in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The Russian imperial arms are emblazoned in the center of the tureen’s lid, beneath the finial, a gilded statuette of a cross-legged, turbaned man. These two features perfectly illustrate Du Paquier’s brilliant integration of flat, painted decoration with three-dimensional applied forms. Circling the body of the tureen is a modeled garland held in the mouths of grotesque masks, its brightly painted flowers popping from the surface. In contrast, geometrical bands of a type called Laub- und Bandelwerk accent the bottom of the tureen and the lid. This decorative motif consisting of infinite variations based on patterns of trelliswork, angled strapwork, and stylized foliage became a virtual signature of the Viennese porcelain. Painted in a distinctive palette of iron-red with purple, blue, and green, the designs highlight the factory’s use of exuberant colors.

While sculptural forms like fish handles and seated-man finials are a hallmark of Du Paquier’s production, some works take these features to the highest level. One of the most charming is a tankard of 1735–40, the handle of which is in the shape of a cooper. Identified by the leather apron he wears under his coat, the craftsman specialized in making barrels like that which forms the shape he holds. Designed to contain beer, Du Paquier tankards often had lids, but the cooper’s hands grasp the rim, preventing a top from being added. The lively expression of the man, the bold pattern of flowers set off by bands of Laub-und Bandelwerk, and the tankard’s exceptionally large size make it a superb example of these drinking vessels.

Among the rarest of Du Paquier’s sculptural vessels is the elephant wine dispenser featured on the front of this release, one of three known to survive. A colorfully glazed version, in the Hermitage, is part of an elaborate centerpiece made about 1740 for Anna Ivanovna. That elephant stands above a rotating silver platter on which eight dancing figures hold cups ready to receive wine from the elephant’s trunk. The elephant is ridden by a figure of Bacchus, who can be lifted to fill the cavity with wine. The pure white surface of the Frick elephant allows the animal’s sculptural details to be clearly seen. Although it is possible that it was prepared as a spare in the event of breakage during firing, close observation reveals that the figure was once cold-painted (meaning paint was applied to the surface of the object, but it was not fired afterward). Elephants were favorites of the Czarina, who received one as a gift from Persian emissaries in 1736 and who featured a full-size model in a festival she staged on the frozen Neva River in 1740.

The elephant wine service was among the last of the great works produced by the Du Paquier manufactory. By 1744, its founder was overcome with debt and was forced to sell the factory to Empress Maria Theresa. Over its three-decade history, Du Paquier produced a body of work that was inventive and often whimsical, a truly distinctive voice in the evolution of European porcelain.

Comments Frick Director Ian Wardropper, “It gives me great pleasure to see these works come to the Frick. In 1993, while I was the Eloise W. Martin Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, Melinda and her sister, Joyce Hill, offered to fund an acquisition in honor of their mother, Eloise. Several suggestions were made, one of which was a group of three exquisite pieces of Du Paquier porcelain that the department was very interested in acquiring. Melinda was smitten with these objects, and—after purchasing the group for the Art Institute—she and her husband, Paul, began to acquire their own Du Paquier works. As their collection grew, so too did their interest in the history of the manufactory and its production, which led them to underwrite the research for and publication of Fired by Passion, a definitive three-volume monograph released in 2009. To celebrate its publication, as the head of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I initiated an exhibition drawn from the Sullivan’s and the Met’s collection (Imperial Privilege: Vienna Porcelain of Du Paquier, 1718–44). We are now honored to have this exceptional selection of porcelains enter The Frick Collection owing to the Sullivans’ extraordinary generosity.”

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From the September 2016 Newsletter on Academic Activities at the Rijksmuseum:

As a Johan Huizinga Fellow, Lieke van Deinsen conducted research into a remarkable collection of eighteenth-century portraits of authors, better known as the Panpoëticon Batavûm. Her findings will be published as the first volume in the new book series Rijksmuseum Studies in History, which will be launched 13 October 2016.

Collecting was extremely fashionable in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Wooden trays and cabinets, made specifically for the purpose, would be filled with collections of coins, stones and shells. The Amsterdam painter, engraver and amateur poet Arnoud van Halen assembled a collection of a different and unique kind. In 1719, he commissioned a cabinet that eventually served as the repository of over three hundred little portraits of Dutch poets past and present. The formal enshrinement of this remarkable collection did not, however, mark its beginning—or its end. Van Halen had started accumulating his Panpoeticon Batavum at the turn of the eighteenth century, and after his death the cabinet and its contents changed hands several times as lovers of literature and literary societies sought to acquire the Panpoëticon. The collection also inspired dozens of poets to articulate their highly emotional reactions on seeing this ground-breaking image of Dutch literary history. The wooden cabinet became the tangible monument to the Dutch literary canon at a time when Dutch culture was primarily described in terms of decline, Frenchification and the waning of the Golden Age.

The history of the Panpoëticon Batavûm literally ended with a bang. The wooden cabinet was severely damaged when a ship filled with gunpowder exploded in the centre of Leiden. In the aftermath of the disaster, the remaining portraits were sold separately and ended up all over Europe. Nowadays, eighty-three of the original portraits can be found in the Rijksmuseum’s collection.

Read more here»

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From the Tate press release (8 September 2016). . .

Tate’s Board of Trustees today announced that Nicholas Serota will step down as Director of Tate next year. The process of finding a new director will begin immediately and is being guided by a specially appointed committee of trustees and external advisers including senior artists.

Nicholas Serota, © Hugo Glendinning, 2016

Tate’s Chairman, Lord Browne said: “We have been privileged to have in Nicholas Serota one of the world’s greatest museum directors and a leader for the visual arts on a global stage. Under his leadership Tate has become a preeminent cultural organisation nationally and internationally and one of the most visited in the world. He has championed British art and artists throughout the world while at the same time ensuring that Tate has become a much loved, open and accessible institution for the public. He leaves Tate in a strong position on which to build for the future. We wish him well as he takes on new responsibilities which will be for the benefit of all the arts.”

Nicholas Serota said: “It has been an exciting challenge to work with successive Chairmen, trustees and groups of extremely talented colleagues to develop the role of Tate in the study, presentation and promotion of British, modern and international art. Over the past thirty years there has been a sea-change in public appreciation of the visual arts in this country. Tate is proud to have played a part in this transformation alongside other national and regional museums and the new galleries that have opened across the country in places like Walsall, Margate, Wakefield, Gateshead and Nottingham. Tate has always been fortunate to have enjoyed the support of artists and to have benefitted from the international acclaim for the work of British artists in recent years. I leave an institution that has the potential to reach broad audiences across the UK and abroad, through its own programmes, partnerships and online.”

Nicholas Serota is a champion of visual arts throughout the UK and abroad. During his 28 years at Tate, he has helped to make Tate an organisation respected throughout the world. It was his vision that led to the creation of Tate Modern and the redefinition of the original gallery at Millbank as Tate Britain. He led the creation of Tate St Ives and has also sought to strengthen the role of Tate as a national institution through the further development of Tate Liverpool in taking a leading part in the celebration of the city as European City of Culture in 2008 and by establishing partnerships with galleries across the country through the Plus Tate programme.

During his term the range of Tate’s collection has broadened to include photography and the geographical reach has been extended across the world, taking a more global view. The collection has also been strengthened by major acquisitions of historic British art, including Wright of Derby’s An Iron Forge 1772, Reynolds’s The Archers 1769, Turner’s Blue Rigi 1842 and Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows 1831. Additions to the modern collection have included major works by Bacon, Beuys, Bourgeois, Brancusi, Duchamp, Horn, Mondrian, Richter and Twombly, amongst many others. The contemporary collection has been developed into one of the strongest in the world. He was instrumental in helping to secure the ARTIST ROOMS collection given to Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland by Anthony d’Offay as a collection to be shown across the UK. In the past ten years, he has curated some of Tate’s most acclaimed and popular exhibitions including Donald Judd, Howard Hodgkin, Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter and Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs.

He will take up the part-time role of Chairman of the Arts Council on 1 February 2017 and will continue at Tate until later in the year.

From the V&A press release(5 September 2016). . .

Martin Roth, Director of the V&A since September 2011, has announced to staff today he will leave his role in the Autumn after five years in post. Martin has presided over a succession of critically acclaimed exhibitions, most notably David Bowie is and Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, achieving record visitor numbers, which last year reached the highest level in the Museum’s 150 year history—as well as the ambitious refurbishment of multiple galleries showcasing the V&A’s world-leading collections, including most recently the new Europe 1600–1815 galleries. He has also overseen major developments including construction of the new Exhibition Road entrance, courtyard and gallery, due to open in 2017, as well as developing significant strategic partnerships in Shenzhen, Dundee and with V&A East in the Queen Elizabeth Park, East London.

Martin Roth, © Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Under his directorship, Martin has established the new Design, Architecture and Digital Department and spearheaded new and socially responsive programming, from the Disobedient Objects exhibition to the current Engineering Season. He has also forged many innovative new partnerships, not least with the Venice Biennale, World Economic Forum and International Olympic Committee. The Museum was recently awarded Art Fund Museum of the Year 2016, the biggest museum prize in the world, and praised for its “exceptional imagination, innovation and achievement across the previous 12 months.”

Martin Roth said: “It’s been an enormous privilege and tremendously exciting to lead this great museum, with its outstanding staff and collections, and I’m proud to have steered it to new successes and a period of growth and expansion, including new partnerships around the UK and internationally. Our recent accolade as Art Fund Museum of the Year feels like the perfect moment to draw to a close my mission in London and hand over to a new director to take the V&A forward to an exciting future.”

Nicholas Coleridge, Chairman of the Trustees of the V&A said: “Martin’s tenure as Director has been marked by a highly successful period of creativity, expansion and reorganisation of the V&A. He has made a significant contribution to the success of this museum, and the Trustees are immensely grateful for all that he has achieved here. We are now starting the process of looking
for someone to take on the role and are fortunate to have an exceptional team in place to lead its activities and help build its future with the new Director.”

Martin intends to devote more time to various international cultural consultancies and plans to spend more time with his wife Harriet and their children, in Berlin and Vancouver. The V&A’s Board of Trustees will now begin the search to find a new Director.

Press release (10 August 2016) from Arts Council England:

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Frederick, 5th Earl of Carlisle, 1769, oil on canvas, 241.4 × 150 cm (Tate Britain)

A major full-length portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) of the 5th Earl of Carlisle (1748–1825), aged 20, has been accepted in lieu of inheritance tax for the nation. This important painting has been allocated to Tate and will remain on public display in its original setting at Castle Howard in North Yorkshire and in the future will be shown elsewhere around the country including Tate Britain.

The portrait, which has long been recognised as one of Reynolds’s masterpieces, was commissioned by the sitter and completed in 1769 when Reynolds was at the height of his powers, having just been elected the first President of the Royal Academy. The painting has always been central to the collection at Castle Howard and has hung there for over 200 years.

The 5th Earl was a key patron and collector of the arts in the North of England in the 18th century. Dressed in formal robes surrounded by classical architecture and his beloved dog Rover at his feet, Carlisle was captured by Reynolds in a lively and highly skilled manner, marking his entry into society following his Grand Tour and his position as head of this important family dynasty. The complex composition, paintwork and use of colour illustrates perfectly why Reynolds was the leading British portrait painter of the 18th century. Reynolds’s composition alludes to the architecture of Castle Howard, designed by Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726). The building of Castle Howard was completed under the supervision of the 5th Earl who filled the great house with his fine collection of Old Masters.

Edward Harley, Chairman of the AIL Panel, said: “The Acceptance in Lieu scheme has been enriching our heritage for over a century; I am delighted that this masterpiece by Reynolds, one of the most important painters of the day, has entered our national collection under the scheme.”

Alex Farquharson, Director, Tate Britain said: “The magnificent painting of Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle 1769 is the first full-length male portrait by Joshua Reynolds to join the Tate collection. A glamorous portrait in oil of the earl and his beloved dog Rover, it is an outstanding example of the type of painting for which Reynolds is most highly acclaimed. I am delighted that this work will now enter the national collection, the greatest collection of British art in the world, and that it will be shown both in its original setting in Castle Howard and, in future, at Tate Britain and elsewhere.”

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As Mark Brown reports for The Guardian (10 August 2016).

An important 18th-century portrait of the 5th Earl of Carlisle by Sir Joshua Reynolds has been accepted for the nation in lieu of £4.7m inheritance tax. . .

The Reynolds painting has been passed down through the family and its offer to the acceptance in lieu scheme (AIL) follows the sale last year of art works and furniture by the castle’s present custodians to help secure the estate’s long-term future [Sotheby’s, July 2015]. The sale raised £12m.

The acceptance in lieu scheme was created in David Lloyd George’s people’s budget of 1910, with hundreds of outstanding objects and collections given as a way of settling tax bills.

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Pair of ebony and rosewood cabinets, inlaid with pietre dure, and mounted with gilt-bronze; made in Rome, ca. 1625, likely for a member of the powerful Borghese family. The gilt-wood stands were made in England, ca. 1800, probably to the designs of the influential Regency designer, Charles Heathcote Tatham, in order to display the cabinets in the spectacular Long Gallery at Castle Howard, Yorkshire (Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum).

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Press release from The Fitzwilliam:

The Fitzwilliam Museum announced today (Monday, 8 August 2016) its successful bid to raise the £1.2 million needed to save an important pair of pietre dure Roman cabinets for the nation. No other pair of Roman hardstone cabinets exist in a public collection in Britain.

The Fitzwilliam is grateful for the support of The National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) for their generous grant of £700,000 and to the Art Fund for their early adoption of this project with a £200,000 grant. The Fitzwilliam also received generous support from numerous other benefactors, including the Pilgrim Trust, to prevent these treasures from leaving the UK.

These unique and highly prized cabinets have been part of the private collection at Castle Howard, Yorkshire, since their purchase by Henry Howard, the 4th Earl of Carlisle, most likely in Rome during his second ‘Grand Tour’ of Italy (1738–39). They were offered for auction at Sotheby’s London, last summer by the Trustees of Castle Howard and sold to a foreign buyer for £1.2 million.

A member of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, (RCEWA), Christopher Rowell, stated that the cabinets, represent “the high watermark of the British taste for Italian princely furniture” and that “with the exception of the National Trust’s cabinet at Stourhead, made in Rome around 1585 for Pope Sixtus V, these are the most significant cabinets of this type in Britain.”

Their historic and cultural value was such that the then Culture Minister Ed Vaizey placed a temporary export bar on the 400-year-old Italian cabinets to provide an opportunity to save them for the nation.

One of the cabinets as installed at Castle Howard.

The cabinets were made in Rome in the first quarter of the 17th century almost certainly for a member of the papal Borghese dynasty, one of the most powerful and wealthy families of their day, and represent the highest quality of furniture-making in 17th century Italy. Veneered with ebony and rosewood, they have been further embellished with inlays of expensive, exotic and vividly coloured semi-precious hardstones (such as lapis lazuli and jasper) and with gilt-bronze statuettes and escutcheons. They are among the most significant cabinets of this type left in Britain, dating back to 1625.

Each cabinet sits on a Neo-classical stand, probably made ca. 1800 to the designs of the influential Regency designer, Charles Heathcote Tatham, for display in the just-completed spectacular Long Gallery at Castle Howard, Yorkshire. Fashioned from mahogany, they boast gilded caryatid supports and other classical ornaments. Showpiece cabinets, like these, were the most prestigious display furniture in 17th-century Europe and were lavishly decorated to reflect the status and taste of their owners and have been eagerly collected ever since.

Tim Knox, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, remarked “Splendid hardstone mounted cabinets such as these were the ultimate trophy of British Grand Tour collectors in the 18th century. With their lavish inlay of electric blue lapis lazuli, and glowing jaspers, and later English stands with gilded caryatids (supports in the form of antique maidens), they are a perfect combination of Italian pomp and English splendour. Nowhere in the UK is it possible to see a pair of Roman cabinets of quite this swagger and splendour. I am thrilled that we have saved these remarkable objects from export and that they can take their place amidst the Fitzwilliam’s world-class collections. They are a fitting acquisition to celebrate the 200th birthday of our founder, Lord Fitzwilliam.”

Sir Peter Luff, Chair of NHMF, said: “Exquisitely beautiful and exceptionally rare, it is when you consider these cabinets in their original context at Castle Howard, one of our finest country house interiors, that they become very important to the UK’s heritage.”

Stephen Deuchar, Art Fund Director, said: “We are very happy to support the Fitzwilliam in acquiring this captivating pair of cabinets, a fantastic addition to the permanent collection in its bicentenary year.”

Sir Mark Jones, Chair, The Pilgrim Trust said “It is great news that these spectacular cabinets, so important for understanding the history of taste in Britain, are to stay in the country.”

The pair of cabinets will go on display at the Museum on Wednesday 10th August, when they will be unveiled as part of the celebrations in honour of the Founder’s Birthday.

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