In 2016 a portrait, identified as Elizabeth Fanshawe (1609-1668), née Cockayne, came up for sale at a well-known auction house (left). This portrait bore an uncanny resemblance to the female sitter in a small double portrait of Sir Thomas Fanshawe and his second wife Elizabeth, née Fanshawe at Valence House (below). A visit to Melbourne […]
When I joined the Garden Museum in April last year, one of our most recent acquisitions was still in store, purchased just several months earlier. It is a remarkable object for the Museum to have in its collection, as well as one of my own personal favourites. It is a small portrait oil on silver […]
I started the day with high hopes. I had recently put together an exhibition of some of the best of the portraits in oil in the Reading Museum collection and felt sure that there would be much of relevance amongst the papers. In addition there would be people to meet and a chance to pop […]
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts’s exhibition Close to the Heart (1 February – 5 May 2013) features around fifty mostly British miniatures dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Half of them are on loan from an eminent UK private collection largely assembled around 1890-1920 on the advice of George C. Williamson (1858-1942), […]
Amy Marquis, Study Room Supervisor (Paintings, Drawings and Prints), The Fitzwilliam Museum, received a Bursary from Understanding British Portraits in October 2012. Here she reflects on the aims of her chosen project. The Fitzwilliam Museum‘s collection, like all collections, is constantly changing, whether this be through high profile acquisitions like our recent successful appeal to save […]
