Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (16 July 1867 – 1 May 1962) was an
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
museum curator and collector. From 1908 to 1937, he was director of the
Fitzwilliam Museum
The Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge. It is located on Trumpington Street opposite Fitzwilliam Street in central Cambridge. It was founded in 1816 under the will of Richard FitzWilliam, 7th Vis ...
in
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...
,
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
.
Biography
Sydney Cockerell made his way initially as clerk in the family coal business, George J. Cockerell & Co., until he met
John Ruskin
John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and pol ...
. Around 1887, Cockerell sent Ruskin some
sea shell
A seashell or sea shell, also known simply as a shell, is a hard, protective outer layer usually created by an animal or organism that lives in the sea. The shell is part of the body of the animal. Empty seashells are often found washe ...
s, which he collected. At that time he had already met
William Morris
William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was a British textile designer, poet, artist, novelist, architectural conservationist, printer, translator and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement. He ...
. Cockerell tried to patch up a quarrel between Ruskin and
Octavia Hill, who had been a friend of his late father Sydney John Cockerell, and godmother to his sister Olive.
From 1891, Cockerell gained a more solid entry to intellectual circles, working for the
Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings
The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) (also known as Anti-Scrape) is an amenity society founded by William Morris, Philip Webb, and others in 1877 to oppose the destructive 'restoration' of ancient buildings occurring in ...
. The architect
Detmar Blow
Detmar Jellings Blow (24 November 1867 – 7 February 1939) was a British architect of the early 20th century, who designed principally in the arts and crafts style. His clients belonged chiefly to the British aristocracy, and later he became es ...
was a friend. He acted as private secretary to William Morris, becoming a major collector of
Kelmscott Press
The Kelmscott Press, founded by William Morris and Emery Walker, published fifty-three books in sixty-six volumes between 1891 and 1898. Each book was designed and ornamented by Morris and printed by hand in limited editions of around 300. Many ...
books;
was secretary also to
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (17 August 1840 – 10 September 1922), sometimes spelt Wilfred, was an English poet and writer. He and his wife Lady Anne Blunt travelled in the Middle East and were instrumental in preserving the Arabian horse bloodlines ...
; and was
Thomas Hardy's executor.
From 1908 to 1937 Cockerell was Director of the
Fitzwilliam Museum
The Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge. It is located on Trumpington Street opposite Fitzwilliam Street in central Cambridge. It was founded in 1816 under the will of Richard FitzWilliam, 7th Vis ...
, in Cambridge. He built up the Museum's collections of private-press books and manuscripts, prints, drawings, paintings (including Titian's ''Tarquin and Lucretia''), ceramics and antiquities. It was he who secured the Museum's rich holdings of works by
William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. ...
and who bought its first Picasso print. He raised funds for building extensions, set up the first 'Friends' scheme in Britain and introduced Sunday opening.
Cockerell appears as one of a circle of three figures in the book by Dame
Felicitas Corrigan
Dame Felicitas Corrigan OSB (6 March 1908 – 7 October 2003, Kathleen Corrigan) was an English Benedictine nun, author and humanitarian.
Biography
Corrigan was born in Liverpool in 1908 to a large family. She learned to play the organ at an ...
, ''The Nun, the Infidel, and the Superman'', with Dame
Laurentia McLachlan
Dame Laurentia McLachlan, OSB, ''née'' Margaret McLachlan, (11 January 1866 – 23 August 1953) was a Scottish Benedictine nun, Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey, and an authority on church music. She became posthumously known to a wide public when po ...
and
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from ...
. It was later dramatised by
Hugh Whitemore
Hugh John Whitemore (16 June 1936 – 17 July 2018) was an English playwright and screenwriter.
Biography
Whitemore studied for the stage at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he was taught by Peter Barkworth, then on the staff at RADA ...
as ''The Best of Friends'',
which was produced on stage at the
Hampstead Theatre
Hampstead Theatre is a theatre in South Hampstead in the London Borough of Camden. It specialises in commissioning and producing new writing, supporting and developing the work of new writers. Roxana Silbert has been the artistic director since ...
in 2006 and on television in 1991
According to
Penelope Fitzgerald
Penelope Mary Fitzgerald (17 December 1916 – 28 April 2000) was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 ''The Times'' listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". ''The Ob ...
's biography of
Charlotte Mew
Charlotte Mary Mew (15 November 1869 – 24 March 1928) was an English poet whose work spans the eras of Victorian poetry and Modernism.
Early life and education
Mew was born in Bloomsbury, London, daughter of the architect Frederick Mew (1 ...
, ''Charlotte Mew and Her Friends'' (1984), "Cockerell was one of the six children of a Brighton coal merchant who died quite young. This meant a hard start, but, as he told his biographer, Wilfred Blunt, 'I was protected by poverty from marriage until I was forty.' During that time he was able to develop his two ruling passions - the arts (or rather the classification and collecting of them), and the cultivating of great men. When he became Director of the Fitzwilliam in 1908 he identified the Museum entirely with himself, and heroic indeed were his efforts to tap bequests, endowments, and death-bed legacies which would enrich it in every department. He calculated that during his lifetime he had made a quarter of a million pounds for the Fitzwilliam, and about a dozen enemies."
He was a leading figure in the revival of italic handwriting as an artistic craft.
Family
He was the son of Sydney John Cockerell (1842–1877) and Alice Elizabeth Bennett, daughter of
Sir John Bennett. The bee expert
Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell
Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell (1866–1948) was an American zoologist, born at Norwood, England, and brother of Sydney Cockerell. He was educated at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, and then studied botany in the field in Colorado in 188 ...
(1866–1948), who settled in the United States, was his brother, as was the bookbinder
Douglas Bennett Cockerell (1870–1945).
The bookbinder Sandy Cockerell (Sydney Morris Cockerell) was his nephew.
He was married to the illuminator and designer
Florence Kate Kingsford, who in 1916 was diagnosed with
multiple sclerosis. They had two daughters, Margaret and Katharine, and a son,
Sir Christopher Cockerell, who invented the
hovercraft.
Sources
Online Archive of California
References
Further reading
* D. Felicitas Corrigan, ''The Nun, the Infidel and the Superman'' (1985, John Murray)
* Stella Panayotova, ''I Turned it into a Palace: Sydney Cockerell and the Fitzwilliam Museum''
xhibition catalogue(2008. Fitzwilliam Museum Enterprises)
External links
Cockerell Papers — Archive Descriptions University of Exeter
, mottoeng = "We Follow the Light"
, established = 1838 - St Luke's College1855 - Exeter School of Art1863 - Exeter School of Science 1955 - University of Exeter (received royal charter)
, type = Public
, ...
*
Sydney Cockerell Papers(MS Eng 1106),
Houghton Library
Houghton Library, on the south side of Harvard Yard adjacent to Widener Library, is Harvard University's primary repository for rare books and manuscripts. It is part of the Harvard College Library, the library system of Harvard's Faculty of ...
,
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cockerell, Sydney
1867 births
1962 deaths
Academics of the University of Cambridge
English curators
English art collectors
Knights Bachelor
Directors of museums in the United Kingdom
People associated with the Fitzwilliam Museum