Just as RAMM borrows objects from other museums, RAMM also lends the collections in its care to museums around the world. Sometimes this is for an exhibition, other times it is for research. Normally these loan objects are from the stored collections.
This blog post highlights just a few of the objects that RAMM has sent out on loan over the two years.
Zennor
Normally on display in RAMM’s Courtyard wall, this sculpture by Barbara Hepworth is currently at Compton Verney in Warwickshire. The show, ‘Landscape and Imagination: From Gardens to Land Art’ explores the beauty of nature, reimagined and reinterpreted through the hands of artists and landscape designers who throughout history have felt the urge to shape the land around them
Chinese objects go to the British Museum
In 2023 RAMM lent five objects to the British Museum’s China’s Hidden Century exhibition. The show revealed the resilience and innovation of 19th-century China. The objects included a wooden seal of Taiping, a scroll, two hair pieces and a pair of Mandarin boots.
The British Museum used details from the scroll on their exhibition merchandise. These are also for sale in the shop at RAMM.
Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit
One of RAMM’s best known and most frequently requested paintings, this portrait has even travelled to Brazil. There has been lively debate over the identity of both sitter and artist. Both remain unknown.
Most recently at RAMM Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit featured in ‘In Plain Sight – Transatlantic slavery and Devon‘
In 2023 the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge included the work in ‘Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance’. It quickly moved to the Royal Academy in London for their 2024 show ‘Entangled Pasts, 1768–now. Art, Colonialism and Change’ . New infra-red scans of the painting were taken between these two shows to continue the debate on sitter and artist.
Read more for a full history of this wonderful painting.
HMS Challenger Specimens
150 years ago HMS Challenger set sail from Portsmouth. The four-year 70,000 nautical mile voyage of exploration went around the globe. The places she visited were not new nor necessarily very exotic, but the discoveries made laid the foundation for the science of oceanography. For the very first time scientists, were able to systematically survey the geology, topography, biology and chemistry of the deep sea.
Several of the HMS challenger specimens at RAMM are currently at the National Museum of the Royal Navy for their exhibition ‘Worlds Beneath the Waves‘.
Wild in Manchester
RAMM has lent a painting by William Widgery, several birds, a fallow deer and a beaver to Manchester Museum for their exhibition ‘Wild‘. The exhibition will challenge the way visitors think about nature. It will take them to wild places across the world to hear a diverse range of voices, from Aboriginal elders to researchers and community activists. It shares how they’re shaping their environments and looking to wild for a more positive future.
Don’t fancy travelling that far? No problem. The show will come to RAMM in summer 2025.
Reclining Nude – Le Lit de Cuivre
This painting by Walter Sickert is currently in London for the exhibition ‘London: An Artistic Crossroads‘. As the National Gallery in London celebrates its bicentenary, Sotheby’s brings together twelve remarkable artworks from the UK’s leading institutions, whose creators were inspired by their time in London, or made this beguiling city their home.
The work is not long back from two other shows: at Tate Britain the Petit Palais in Paris. Both were major retrospectives of Sickert’s work.
Kingsteignton figure
This wooden human figure is incredibly rare. Only six other finds are known in Britain. This one was found by chance during quarrying in 1867 at Zitherixon Quarry. It may have been a religious idol, a gift to the gods or even a child’s toy.
It is on long term loan to RAMM from a quarrying company. Normally it is on permanent display in RAMM’s Making History gallery. The company permitted RAMM to lend it to the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol for Garry Fabian Miller’s exhibition ‘ADORE‘.
Wilfred Avery
A loan to the Museum of Barnstable and north Devon of three paintings by local artist Wilfred Avery.
Miss Linter’s land snail
This shell is from the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. It is currently on loan to the Natural History Museum in London to allow a visiting researcher from Johannesburg to use it in his research.
It is Sowerby’s ‘type’ specimen of Achatina linterae. This means it is the same specimen he had in front of him when he first described this new species. He named it after Miss Linter. Taxonomists need to access these specimens when researching how one species is related to or the same as another.
Apollo-lyre
This instrument, the Apollo Lyre, is actually a guitar hybrid. It resembles a lyre, with its lyre-shaped box and extrusions. However, it has the neck, strings and frets of a guitar.
Yaniewicz and Company in Liverpool made this instrument around 1800 when neo-Classicism was in vogue. The gilded beadwork arms imitate a classical lyre’s shape. The front is decorated with a repetitive pattern featuring gilded faces intertwined with leaves. On the top of the guitar neck a sunburst surrounds a gilded Grecian female head.
In 2022 the lyre made its way to The Georgian House in Edinburgh for the exhibition ‘Felix Yaniewicz: music and migration in Georgian Edinburgh‘
The Grand Tour
Lent to Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham for display in ‘The Grand Tour’.
The artist Thomas Patch, originally from Exeter, travelled in Italy in 1747 and settled in Florence in 1755. At that time, Florence was a key venue for the English gentry on the Grand Tour of Europe, and in this work Patch has satirised the attitudes of cultural tourists aspiring to be connoisseurs.
Just up the road
This Limoge enamel crucifixion figurine spent a year at Newton Abbot Museum, close to where it was found.
A researcher borrowed specimens of a tiny millipede (Anthogona britannica) to illustrate for a scientific paper. RAMM’s former curator of natural history Dave Bolton collected them.
The researcher said, ‘this species is endemic to Britain, only known from Devon and I’m certain you have more specimens than anyone else in the world – so it’s an important collection!’
Longer term loans
There are a few objects that RAMM loans out for longer periods of time than temporary exhibitions. Some are to other Exeter buildings, others are further afield. There are currently around 175 items on long term loan. This is a selection:
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