Treasured Possessions: Material culture at the Fitzwilliam
Walk into Treasured Possessions at the Fitzwilliam Museum and you are met with a painting by Jan van Meyer: The daughters of Sir Matthew Decker (1718). Four polite, demure young girls stare out at you from the canvas, framed within a stone window, a rich curtain drawn back to reveal the sisters and their objects. On the ledge in front of them perfect grapes attest to their virginity, ripe unblemished peaches to their honour, and a small dog to their social status. These serious young ladies, with their gestures, possessions and surroundings are carefully contrasted with the gambolling putti on the relief below.
Thus you are perfectly introduced to an exhibition about people's relationship with their things. Treasured Possessions follows Europe's evolving fascination with objects from the Renaissance to Enlightenment. It considers how expanding knowledge of the world, changing materials and fashions, patterns of production and consumption are reflected in the things people owned and used, and which ended up in museums. Decker's daughters were among the paintings that were given to the University of Cambridge by Richard, 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam, thus founding the museum.
This is a rich and detailed exhibition, both in objects and text, which is steeped in the latest research in material culture. It is packed with both objects and themes, but rewards careful attention and devotion of time. Across three broad sections, a sumptuous range of objects show the changing shape of European material culture.
'A new world of goods' looks at what was available to trade, buy and sell, from luxurious imported exotics to street vendors. The ephemeral nature of many goods is emphasised through the receptacles that contained them - tea, coffee, chocolate, alcohol - or through the paper trails of trade cards and receipts that surrounded them. The addition of recorded street cries begins to give you a sense of the sensory spaces within which such goods were experienced.
'The fashionable body' turns to objects used to adorn and adapt the human figure: exquisite shoes, fans, stomachers or armour. A number of paintings are used to stress how dress and comportment were crucial, as ever, to how early modern men and women presented themselves to others, and how different social groups established their boundaries. The reconstruction of a striking red and yellow number from German banker Matthew Schwarz's book of fashions shows the lengths that some went to in achieving their desired look.
'At home and on display' considers the many and varied ways that objects entered and changed people's homes. The more obvious spaces like the Renaissance collector's study, the eighteenth-century writing desk, or the elaborate dining table are paired with mourning jewellery, ceramic cradles given to celebrate a birth, or elaborate (and extraordinary) needle work panels.
There is morality in these objects as well as meaning. Careful stress is put on the gesture over a market stall that makes a painting a lesson on female virtue as well as a source for studying early modern produce. The plain back of an 'undress' corset shows the parts of the body, and of intimate wear, that would never be shown even when déshabillé. Laborious needlework is the material sign of a virtuous female life, as much as the embroidery also tells a moral story.
And, of course, all these objects are 'treasured' because they are in a museum, forever cared for in trust for the public. The exhibition ends with locks and keys, the solid metal objects that keep valuable possessions safe. This nicely contrasts with the fragile Elizabethan shoes earlier in the display, found during building work at Corpus Christi college, intact only through being hidden away. Amongst all the treasure, this exhibition also reminds us of the transience of possessions and the whimsy of which ones survive to tell such stories today.