Julien Parsons:
RAMM’s been collecting fine art ever since it opened in the 1860s, and over the last 150 years we've collected an enormous range. At the moment, we have about 7,000 pieces of art in the collection.
I'm Julian Parsons; I'm Head of Collections at RAMM.
The collection, which is largely in store, we select pieces for a particular exhibition, which we call a hang – basically a rotation of the works every few months – so that we can give a new theme or a new interpretation to the pieces. And I think that's important because obviously we can't display all of the material, but we want to give people access to as much of the art as we can do.
The collection, certainly for the first hundred years, the first century, was very much about collecting deceased artists, it was about collecting historical works, and that's reflected in much of the collection.
So this is the portrait of Joan Tuckfield, which is one of the earliest works in RAMM's collection. We know that Joan was the wife of the Exeter mayor, John Tuckfield, who was mayor of Exeter in 1550.
After John's death, Joan remained a really important member of Exeter society, which perhaps we don't think about in the late medieval period, about women being important members of society, but she certainly was. So she was well connected and wealthy and influential.
Recent research has even showed where she lived, and we know she lived in the St Pancras parish of Exeter, in one of the wealthiest areas in the city to live, on the High Street.
So, if you look really closely at the portrait, and it was shown in an X-ray as well, you can actually see the remains of a stand-up collar, which Joan would've originally been shown in. The painting was repainted with a more fashionable, gable-shaped hood.
People wanted to be shown in the most fashionable costume in their paintings. So sometimes these, if the works took a long time to produce, people would change their fashions to make sure they were shown in the most up-to-date gear in the modern parlance.
So I think it's great the way that you can look at the portrait of Joan. She's quite a severe-looking lady, but, in fact, there's a great story behind her. And we know that when she passed away, she left money in her will to charities for the poor. So there's a sense of that in the painting, I think, and I think that's a really wonderful portrait.
Within the collection, there's obviously work by some of the most important artists in British art history. One of those is J.M.W. Turner. Turner came to the South West on a number of occasions, and we know he came in 1814 and he was making sketches around the Dart Valley, around the River Dart.
Twelve years later, he turned one of these sketches and groups of sketches into a more finished work, which shows Buckfastleigh Abbey, and the River Dart snaking through the valley. And it also shows, in the foreground, a couple of boys pinching eggs from bird's nests. So there's a kind of real sense of the local flavour as well.
There's a variety in the collection, but there's also a sense of continuity and coherence. So the work, it focuses on the South West, and Devon in particular. Right from the 18th century, artists came to the South West to depict the landscape, in particular because of the nature of the scenery and because of the importance of the area in terms of an artistic retreat, an artistic area.
So, almost a hundred years after Turner, artists were still coming to the South West. And in 1913, Lucien Pissarro came to the South West. The painting that we have is a painting that shows Riversbridge Farm, which is a farm set in beautiful scenery.
Lucien Pissarro was the eldest son of Camille Pissarro, the French Impressionist painter. He was brought up, you know, surrounded by artists like Renoir and Monet, Seurat. And I think you can immediately see in Pissarro's work, it still bears the remnants, the echoes of his upbringing in France with this very impressionistic feeling.
Pissarro kept on coming back to this scene to try and capture the moment when the apple blossom starts to emerge on the trees. Apparently, it was a very wet spring that year in 1921, so he had to find the right kind of moment, just when he thought the trees were at their best.
Another piece that I particularly like is the portrait of Abraham Cann. We don't know the identity of the artist for certain, but it's thought to be Henry Caunter, and it was painted around 1850. The work shows a really distinctive figure, and if you look at the painting, there are clues to his occupation.
The hat and the scarf and the coat of the main figure, and he's leaning against a plinth, and on the plinth, there's a figure of Hercules showing strength, and then a carved plinth with a couple of figures. And if you look carefully at the figures, you'll see that they're about to start a wrestling bout. These are all clues to the identity of Abraham Cann, who was the last champion in Devon-style wrestling.
The stories are they would soak their boots in, for example, things like bull's blood, so that they would be left to dry and become really hard, so they could inflict more injuries on their opponents. So this is why Abraham Cann became so successful, we think.
The collections are also an inspiration for living artists. So, obviously, we've worked with contemporary artists on particular projects around the collections. And also there's a sense that we still want to collect. You know, this isn't a dead collection, it's a collection that's growing all the time.
The value of the collection really is, certainly for the views of the local area, is that they encapsulate, often, a history, building, street scenes that have gone completely. And, for example, in Exeter, obviously it was bombed during the war, a lot of that has gone forever, and sometimes the only record of some of these street scenes, some of these fantastic historic buildings, exist within the paintings that we have here: the watercolours, the drawings, the sketches.
So it's a really valuable resource. This is one of the reasons that we put as much as we can online, so that people have access to the material: not just for its artistic merit, but for its value in historical research and family histories. So it's a really dynamic sense of activity on the collection.
One of the joys of working in the museum and working as a curator, or a member of the collections team, is being able to get so close to the works. I mean, you know, I think that's an experience that very few people have, especially when you're looking at the work of great, renowned artists, great masters of their trade. That feels like a real privilege.
It's the sense of the endeavour required to produce great art which strikes me. It's not just about talent; it's also about hard work and dedication and doing the same thing over and over again. So I feel there's a sense of understanding that in life, probably like in art, it's part talent, but it's also part dedication and motivation and focus. I think that's one of the things I take away from the collection.
