"From Reason to Revolution" at the Fitzwilliam Museum

Written by Umberto Napolitano Friday, 02 September 2011 21:32

Cambridge, UK - This exhibition presents highlights from the Fitzwilliam Museum’s eighteenth-century collections, including many from the founder’s original bequest. Through paintings, prints, drawings, rare books, ceramics, sculpture and other objects. and includes works by William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Joseph Wright and William Blake.

The exhibition will explore the many paradoxes of the so-called ‘Age of Reason’. On exhibition through 27 January, 2008.

The influence of the antique on professional artists and architects is clear from countless architectural drawings and landscape views produced on the Grand Tour. These works will be displayed alongside objects that characterize the mundane aspects of continental travel, including sketches, caricatures and souvenirs.

Transporting the visitor back to Britain, the social climate will be examined through artworks relating to prominent individuals, working people and rising professionals. Scientific and industrial advances will be documented alongside representations of the fundamental human conflicts that they brought to the fore.

The contrast between Britain’s burgeoning industrial successes and its less palatable social changes is brought into sharp relief with the eighteenth-century taste for acerbic satire, as evinced by works by James Gillray and Hogarth, whose cautionary narratives expose the public ills of London life. Elsewhere, the new spirit of social mobility receives a completely different treatment, in the aspirational portraits of the period’s affluent professionals. The effect of the Enlightenment’s advances in science and technology is evident from works such as Valentine Green’s Experiment with an Air Pump after Joseph Wright’s painting, whilst other works reveal a sense of apprehension regarding man’s new relationship to nature.

A century of enlightenment, inspired by increasingly far-reaching international exploration, also witnessed the peak of transatlantic slavery. The slave trade, and the dramatic campaigns against it that culminated in its abolition in Britain in 1807, will be explored alongside works that show responses to the revolutions in America and France.

History of The Fitzwilliam Museum . . The Fitzwilliam Museum was described by the Standing Commission on Museums & Galleries in 1968 as "one of the greatest art collections of the nation and a monument of the first importance". It owes its foundation to Richard, VII Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion who, in 1816, bequeathed to the University of Cambridge his works of art and library, together with funds to house them, to further "the Increase of Learning and other great Objects of that Noble Foundation".

Visit The Fitzwilliam Museum -Trumpington Street - Cambridge CB2 1RB : www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk