It is our mission to touch people’s lives by engaging powerfully, thoughtfully and pleasurably with as wide a public as possible and to produce and promote innovative, relevant, and interdisciplinary research of the highest quality around our collections.
The Fitzwilliam Museum is widely considered the world’s outstanding university art collection. We care for works of art and material culture from Europe, Egypt and Asia of exceptional international importance, works that connect people across cultures and time. Founded in 1816 ‘for the increase of learning’, the Fitzwilliam has long been both a great public cultural asset and an extraordinary scholarly resource – local, regional, national and global. The Museum is also a place of enormous potential; we must now build on our achievements, bringing them together in ways that will be truly transformational.
All our work begins with the people who experience our great collections. Through our displays and public programmes, we provide opportunities to discover major works by some of the most famous artists of all time, as well as an abundance of objects documenting lives that otherwise went largely unrecorded. The Fitzwilliam has other extraordinary assets: our remarkable record of pioneering research and, just as important, of innovative public engagement. The passionate loyalty of the Museum’s current visitors matches the energy and talent of our expert and committed workforce. We are proud of our striking Grade-I listed buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with some of the finest museum interiors in Britain. These features of our appearance and tradition that make us so special for so many will be the starting blocks for our future initiatives.
Now we must successfully engage a much broader and more diverse audience, and develop our collections in ways that better reflect the backgrounds and interests of all our visitors. Simultaneously, the Fitzwilliam is poised to develop its relationship with the rest of the University of Cambridge and its great resource of enquiring minds. By fully unifying our public benefit roles and our collaborative research activity, we will play an ever more crucial role in the University of Cambridge’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. To make this possible, we must develop robust systems of revenue generation to support our operating costs and to reflect our growing ambitions.
The mission of the University of Cambridge is to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
The University's core values are as follows:
Local governance is undertaken by the Syndicate of the Fitzwilliam Museum.
As at October 2021 the Syndics are:
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