Lord Fitzwilliam's print albums as evidence

Abstract

The Fitzwilliam Museum houses one of the world’s most important print collections, second only in the United Kingdom to that at the British Museum. At its core is one of its great treasures, the 198 print albums compiled by the museum’s founder, Richard, 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam (1745-1816). Containing approximately 40,000 prints collected over 50 years, the albums are an extremely rare survival of an eighteenth-century print collection, which even in its day, was considered remarkable. Fitzwilliam occasionally acquired fully assembled albums, but most of the prints in the collection were purchased singly or in groups. We know that Fitzwilliam arranged the prints into a specific desired order, and had them pasted by their edges onto one side of plain drawing paper. He paid great attention to the decorative effect of the finished sheets. Neatness, symmetry and elegance are characteristic qualities across all his albums. Fitzwilliam kept the sheets in unbound portfolios before sending them to a binder with specific instructions as to how he wanted them bound. Fitzwilliam assembled his collection during a particularly interesting period in the history of print scholarship: the introduction of the oeuvre catalogue and the work of the Viennese scholar, Adam Bartsch (1757-1821). The choice to arrange his albums by printmaker rather than image designer predates the publication of Le Peintre Graveur, but its influence on the collection is clearly evident. There is frustratingly little documentation to indicate how Fitzwilliam went about acquiring his prints, but the albums themselves provide a rich source of information; not only of Fitzwilliam’s tastes and preoccupations as a gentleman amateur print collector, but of the subsequent changing status of these objects within the Museum’s collection. The use, display and conservation of these objects has always been challenging and the albums show clear evidence of past struggles, which in themselves are very revealing. Some of the albums were dismantled later in the nineteenth century and individual prints have periodically been temporarily removed for display, but very fortunately, the collection has remained substantially intact. This paper will discuss the challenges associated with such a collection and the factors that influence the current approach taken by the Fitzwilliam Museum regarding the use of these objects. Plans for the future conservation and study of the albums will also be discussed. This paper will draw from evidence found in the albums which are much greater than a sum of their parts; information that would certainly have been lost had they suffered the fate of so many other collections of print albums.