β: This is a Beta release of the Fitzwilliam Museum's potential new website.
We want to co-design
our Virtual Museum presence with you.
You can return to our current site at any time.
Following the Government announcement yesterday, museums and galleries in Cambridge will be closed to the public as part of a period of national/local restrictions. So, with great sadness, we will not be able to reopen as planned on 2 January 2021.
Love is very much in the air in this exhibition, which contains objects alive with the range of emotions that it commands; from admiration and affection, joy and passion, longing and despair, to insults, indifference, grief and remembrance.
The exhibition showcases the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection of valentines, which date from the 18th century to the 20th, and include a wide variety of sentimental and decorative types as well as comic examples. Alongside the valentines will be an assortment of other objects relating to the theme of love, including posy rings, love tokens and works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and James Gillray (1756-1815).