Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge explores founder’s slavery links

An exhibition by the Fitzwilliam Museum will explore Cambridge’s connections to enslavement and exploitation for the first time, both in the university and the city.

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance features works made in west Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe, and interrogates the ways Atlantic enslavement and the Black Atlantic shaped the University of Cambridge’s collections.

Historic pieces will be exhibited in dialogue with works by modern and contemporary black artists including Donald Locke, Barbara Walker, Keith Piper, Alberta Whittle and Jacqueline Bishop.

Between 1400 and 1900, people resisting colonial slavery in the Americas produced new cultures known as the Black Atlantic, the museum said.

By asking questions about how Atlantic enslavement and the Black Atlantic shaped the university’s collections, the museum said it has made new discoveries about Cambridge’s own connection to colonialism.

The exhibition begins by looking at the early history of the Fitzwilliam Museum and its founder, Viscount Richard Fitzwilliam (1745-1816). A student at Cambridge, Fitzwilliam left a large sum of money and an extensive art collection to the university upon his death, founding the museum that bears his name.

It is revealed how a significant part of Fitzwilliam’s wealth and art collection was inherited from his grandfather Matthew Decker, a prominent Dutch-born British merchant and financier who in 1700 helped to establish the South Sea Company, which obtained exclusive rights to traffic African people to the Spanish colonial Americas.

The show’s first section, Glimpses of the World Before Transatlantic Enslavement, will highlight the independent histories of west Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, with highlights including rare pre-1500 tools and ceremonial stone objects from the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and Jan Jansz Mostaert’s Portrait of an African Man, which is believed to be the earliest individual portrait of a black person in European art.

Section two, Cambridge Wealth from Atlantic Enslavement, reveals how the profits of enslavement filtered into everyday life in Britain, and how European colonies passed laws that created racial categories to justify enslavement and promote anti-black racism.

Examples of historical race-based pseudoscience, some developed by academics at Cambridge, will be displayed alongside reflective pieces by contemporary artists, curators, activists and academics.

Fashion, Consumption, Racism and Resistance looks at how products harvested by enslaved people – from mahogany, ivory and turtle shell to coffee, sugar cane and tobacco – became fashionable materials for European luxury goods and central to everyday consumption in Britain.

And the final chapter, Plantations: Production and Resistance, highlights the contribution of Indigenous, enslaved and free black people to major scientific discoveries and botanical knowledge, which were brought back to Britain. Among the works included is John Tyley’s drawing of a young man sitting under a breadfruit tree – a rare example of a historic and named black artist depicting a black subject.

The exhibition, which opens in September, is the first in a series of planned shows and interventions at the Fitzwilliam Museum between 2023 and 2026.

Luke Syson, the museum’s director, said the exhibition was “an important moment in the history of the Fitzwilliam”.

He added: “Reflecting on the origins of our museum, the exhibition situates us within an enormous transatlantic story of exploitation and enslavement, one whose legacy is in many ways as pervasive and insidious today as it was in the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth century.”