Bath's Holburne museum to reopen after �15m revamp with hundreds of previously undisplayed pieces
After three years' closure and �15m spent, one of the best-loved regional museums, the Holburne in Bath, is set to reopen with a shocking array of fakes and forgeries.
The museum reopens on 14 May, with a spectacular Eric Parry designed ceramic and glass extension into the beautiful gardens behind the original building, once a hotel for wealthy tourists when Bath was one of most fashionable spa resorts in Europe. Visitors will see hundreds of objects never displayed before ? but many are not what Sir William Holburne hoped when he stuffed his home with treasures, with more than 100 pieces of china, 15 tables, 21 chairs, a grand piano and scores of paintings displayed in his drawing room alone.
When he died in 1874, his sister, Mary, bequeathed his entire collection of paintings, armour, ceramics, bronzes, snuff boxes, books and furnitureto the people of Bath, including a Leonardo da Vinci that wasn't, a vase that wasn't Roman, and a porcelain monkey that wasn't made for a German emperor, all of which had cost Holburne very dear.
The museum's most famous fake, however, has been partly rehabilitated. His Leonardo was one of Holburne's most prized possessions, and when he lent it to an exhibition in Leeds in 1868 he labelled it: "This exquisite female head by Leonardo da Vinci". It was exposed as definitively not da Vinci almost a century ago by a former curator, and since it was once owned by Sir William's neighbour, an artist called Thomas Barker ? renowned for his imitation Old Masters ? the museum feared the worst. Cleaning for the redisplay revealed a surprise: not a Leonardo, but not a Barker either, a beautiful fragment of a genuine early 16th century work. "We've lost a dodgy Leonardo and gained a gorgeous genuine nymph, we're very well pleased with the bargain," director Xa Sturgis said.
Many of Holburne's acquisitions were genuine treasures, including a bronze St George and the Dragon once owned by Charles I, and an extraordinary 16th century folding combined fork, spoon and pen. Holburne collected spoons obsessively. "This is our attempt to make spoons look interesting," Sturgis sighed over one of the many new spoon displays and research for the opening has revealed that one in gold, ornamented with skeletons, commemorated a seven-year-old Dutch girl, Elisabeth Boser, who died in a plague epidemic in 1664 in Amsterdam which also killed Rembrandt's mistress Hendrickje Stoffels. The spoon marked a death warrant for many in England: despite panic stricken quarantine measures detailed in Samuel Pepys's diary, the epidemic spread to London in 1665 where it was known as The Great Plague, and killed an estimated one in five of the population.
? The Holburne museum reopens on May 14, free apart from a �6.50 admission charge for a temporary exhibition of work by and memorabilia owned by Sir Peter Blake.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/may/02/fakes-forgeries-holburne-museum-new-era
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