A captivating cabinet

I have long wanted to visit the Holburne Museum in Bath. As it is in a museums network with both the Wallace Collection and Waddesdon Manor, where I interned many moons ago, I kept coming across the Holburne and being intrigued. This weekend I finally made it, and this jewel of a museum was well worth the wait.

The Holburne is part personal collection part museum of the eighteenth century, so regulars of this blog will be unsurprised that I loved it. The main museum is a spectacular Georgian building at the end of Great Pulteney Street, right in the heart of impeccably planned Georgian Bath. Once a hotel, the building was turned into the public home for the collections of Sir William Holburne in the 1910s. Recently, the museum closed for refurbishment and opened with a striking new extension. This links the Holburne out into Sydney Gardens, creating a lovely cafe space, as well as allowing visual connections from the collections out into a contemporary landscaped garden.

Thanks to this extension, the collections are effectively split into two display areas. The original neo-classical rooms at the front are used to mount eighteenth-century style displays. Upstairs you find portraiture, the archetype of fashionable Georgian Bath, with some spectacular examples. Downstairs sixteenth and seventeenth-century paintings are displayed with maiolica, bronzes and furniture. The new extension allows for a brilliantly conceived 'cabinet of curiosities' style display of Sir William's collections, arranged on two floors around a central evocation of his study, crammed with objects, which unites the two floors. Surrounding this are discussions of eighteenth-century commodities and aesthetic tastes, sixteenth and seventeenth-century Netherlandish art (in which the collections are particularly strong), and Sir William's collection-shaping Grand Tour experiences. In one simple wall of print images the Holburne evokes the feel of the period which I have just spent a term trying to teach!

The front room of maiolica et al, is also used to show changing installations of contemporary art. The current exhibition is Folden Beauty: Masterpieces in Linen by artist Joan Sallas. I didn't feel it was entirely visually successful, some of the structures and linens feeling rather crude, but the overall effect in the beautifully-lit room nicely evoked Renaissance table dressing. There is also a small temporary exhibition space upstairs which currently has a lovely small show Syvlia Gosse - Streets of Bath, which juxtaposes Gosse's gentle watercolours of Bath streets with modern photographs by Dan Brown. Both bode well for what is a vibrant and now state of the art museum.