15 December 2008

Fitzwilliam Museum

The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge holds many happy memories for me. Way back when, I worked just about next door and spent many a lunchtime in the museum, especially for lunchtime concerts in the big room at the top of the grand stairs, with 18th century portraits of large country squires in silk waistcoats staring down, and persian rugs underfoot.

Now the museum has a website with 124,000 images from its collection and a plethora of online exhibitions and podcasts. Exhibitions of prints by Yoshitoshi, for instance -
and photographs of medieval and chained libraries as they were in the 1890s -
This cupboard was in use in Bolton Grammar School, 1902 -
The listing of objects in the museum's applied art collection includes 508 embroideries and 67 woven textiles - with extensive catalogue details but not all photographed.

2 comments:

Hilary said...

Margaret, we have a chained library in Wimborn Minster just down the hill. The man who looks after it and guides you around is an absolute fountain of knowledge of the quirky things that are written in the books.

Hilary

Julie said...

We also have a chained library at St Wulfram's church in Grantham Lincs. It is in a tiny room on the South side of the church with a tiny window looking down into the body of the church. It is opened just a few times a year to allow people to go up for a look.