'The thing about parent bodies is that they are very supportive but a bit mean with the pocket money,' says Duncan Robinson, the director of Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum, leaning forward and giving a conspiratorial wink.
It is a week after the museum managed to snatch the Macclesfield Psalter from under the nose of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Robinson is in good spirits.
The Macclesfield Psalter is a small medieval manuscript of huge importance and the story of its acquisition is typical of museum purchases in Britain. Having been sold at auction for £1.685m, the museum's lack of 'pocket money' meant that it had to scrabble around for external funds to buy the psalter before the export stop ran out.
Robinson found out about the manuscript when it came up for auction following the cataloguing of the Earl of Macclesfield's library at Shirburn Castle in Oxford.
He rang round the other British institutions that might be interested, principally the British Library and the Bodleian, and the general consensus was that as the psalter was East Anglian in origin, the Fitzwilliam was the right institution to have it.
The museum was able to pull together £100,000 of its own money, £35,000 from the Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund) pledged £400,000. But the museum's application to the Heritage Lottery Fund was turned down, mainly Robinson thinks, because it was unclear at that stage how much it was going to cost.
After the auction, the government agreed to an export ban, and the reviewing committee made the psalter a starred item, defining it as an indispensable part of Britain's heritage.
As a result the National Heritage Memorial Fund committed £844,000, and the Art Fund increased its grant to £500,000 and offered to run a national fundraising campaign, launching the public appeal on the BBC's Culture Show.
As a result of the campaign, the reviewing committee granted a three-month extension to the export ban. The museum and the Art Fund finally raised the £200,000 needed to reach the total a week before the manuscript was scheduled to be shipped out.
'It was a great relief,' Robinson admits. 'We're delighted it is here and it is great timing. We'd already planned the Cambridge Illuminations exhibition, a major exhibition of Cambridge manuscripts this summer, which means the public access concerns will be answered in trumps.
The psalter's binding is split, so we're going to take it apart and show it leaf by leaf, and then at the end of the exhibition bind it back together.'
We are sitting in Robinson's office in Grove Lodge, the museum's administrative building, which is best described as academic shabby. The room has furniture by contemporary designer Alan Peters - a lucky second-hand buy - fading wallpaper and a two-bar electric heater in the fireplace.
Robinson and his wife used to live in the flat upstairs, which was reserved for the director, but since he became the Master of Magdalene College they have moved into accommodation there.
Despite the lack of money, Robinson describes the Fitzwilliam as a 'very acquisitive' museum. It has a large number of small endowments, which it uses as seed money to get external grants.
Robinson says it hardly ever misses a month applying to the Art Fund. But despite the protracted process of applying to various funding bodies, Robinson does not think there should be a single fund that museums can apply to.
'The advantage of having multiple streams is that if one closes another opens,' he says. 'There needs to be more money, but I don't necessarily think concentrating it is the answer.' He also thinks that for all its faults, the export bar system may be the best option there is.
'It could be worse, but the question is could it be better?' He continues: 'I don't have a simple answer to that. We have a reasonable system which reflects the rights of owners to dispose of property, and that has counted for a lot in this country. But museums are concerned that a lot of things are coming on to the market. There is a limit to how much public money is available.'
Robinson agrees with Nicholas Goodison, whose report for the Treasury on the issue was published in January last year. Goodison argued that the answer is to encourage private treaty sales, developing a sense of trust between public institutions and private owners: 'We need to accept the heritage of this country and the fact that items are often in private hands,' Robinson says.
'The Madonna of the Pinks is a classic example of a lack of consultation between owner and the institution where it was on view. It worries me that owners don't feel there is a great advantage in private treaty sales.'
But despite the problems, he does think that the state of collecting in British museums generally is improving. He says that when he came back to Britain in 1995 to take up his current post, having been the director of the Yale Center for British Art in the US, he discovered that collecting was not even on the agenda for many museums.
'I was very depressed at how many museums had given up on acquisition because of underfunding. Fortunately, it does seem in the past few years that one has grounds for optimism. For many museums acquisitions are their lifeblood, responsible for a lot of the electricity of the curatorial staff.'
Dressed in an olive-green suit, with a dark bow tie, purple shirt and a red handkerchief tucked neatly in his top pocket, the 61-year-old Robinson looks like an old-fashioned museum director full of a 1940s-esque bonhomie. But he also embraces modern ideas. Unlike some directors he is glad that the issue of disposal is back on the agenda, for example.
Robinson was born in Staffordshire in 1943, where his mother had been evacuated during the war. His father was a London businessman, but became a civilian casualty of the war when Robinson was 15 months old. As a result, he and his mother stayed in Staffordshire, where his mother was a school teacher and later headmistress.
He wasn't an avid museum-goer as a child and didn't think of himself as a visual person. When he went to university, at Clare College in Cambridge, he studied English. His interest in art was sparked by a trip to Italy during a summer holiday, but at that stage he still assumed he would follow his mother into some sort of teaching job.
After graduating he got a place to do an MA in the history of art at Yale. It was there that he decided he wanted a career in art history.
When he came back to Britain he started a PhD in Cambridge, but a job came up as an assistant keeper of paintings and drawings at the Fitzwilliam, which he applied for and got. He later became a keeper, before going to the Yale Center to be its director in 1981, staying for 14 years.
One of his tasks at the Yale Center was to help bring the museum closer to the university. In Cambridge, the Fitzwilliam has been increasingly integrated with the university since the 1970s, and Robinson has continued that process. All the curatorial staff are actively researching and also teach at the university.
And Robinson says that in the current climate, where Cambridge is under pressure to be more open, the relationship is one of 'growing interdependence'. 'For the first time the museum is seen as useful to the university,' he says. 'The university is under pressure to open up learning and the Fitzwilliam is a place where it can demonstrate it is looking to its wider public.'
He feels that museums in the US have addressed accessibility faster than those in the UK. 'There was a tendency in England to think of museums as passive repositories.
The public were expected to have the educational background to take themselves to the museum and to understand it when they got there. What we've learned from the US is that museums can do much more than that.'
This was the thinking underlying the Fitzwilliam's £12m extension, which opened in June last year. Robinson worked closely with the architect John Miller and Partners in the early stages of its design, visiting the practice's studio once or twice a month.
The extension comprises new gallery space, education rooms and a larger shop and cafe, but also serves as a modern, ground floor entrance, in stark contrast to the museum's original entrance, a grand portico perched at the top of stone stairs.
Robinson says it would be an exaggeration to say it has transformed the museum, but it has changed the message it is sending out.
'I probably sound like a dinosaur when talking about breaking down barriers, but I think a lot of people underestimate how forbidding traditional museums can be,' he says. 'The new entrance advertises that this is a public building that is open to everyone.
Access is a word that is used so much it has almost been debased of its meaning, but it is an important word. Not just physical access, but intellectual access, using objects as a window to knowledge.' mj
It is a week after the museum managed to snatch the Macclesfield Psalter from under the nose of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Robinson is in good spirits.
The Macclesfield Psalter is a small medieval manuscript of huge importance and the story of its acquisition is typical of museum purchases in Britain. Having been sold at auction for £1.685m, the museum's lack of 'pocket money' meant that it had to scrabble around for external funds to buy the psalter before the export stop ran out.
Robinson found out about the manuscript when it came up for auction following the cataloguing of the Earl of Macclesfield's library at Shirburn Castle in Oxford.
He rang round the other British institutions that might be interested, principally the British Library and the Bodleian, and the general consensus was that as the psalter was East Anglian in origin, the Fitzwilliam was the right institution to have it.
The museum was able to pull together £100,000 of its own money, £35,000 from the Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund) pledged £400,000. But the museum's application to the Heritage Lottery Fund was turned down, mainly Robinson thinks, because it was unclear at that stage how much it was going to cost.
After the auction, the government agreed to an export ban, and the reviewing committee made the psalter a starred item, defining it as an indispensable part of Britain's heritage.
As a result the National Heritage Memorial Fund committed £844,000, and the Art Fund increased its grant to £500,000 and offered to run a national fundraising campaign, launching the public appeal on the BBC's Culture Show.
As a result of the campaign, the reviewing committee granted a three-month extension to the export ban. The museum and the Art Fund finally raised the £200,000 needed to reach the total a week before the manuscript was scheduled to be shipped out.
'It was a great relief,' Robinson admits. 'We're delighted it is here and it is great timing. We'd already planned the Cambridge Illuminations exhibition, a major exhibition of Cambridge manuscripts this summer, which means the public access concerns will be answered in trumps.
The psalter's binding is split, so we're going to take it apart and show it leaf by leaf, and then at the end of the exhibition bind it back together.'
We are sitting in Robinson's office in Grove Lodge, the museum's administrative building, which is best described as academic shabby. The room has furniture by contemporary designer Alan Peters - a lucky second-hand buy - fading wallpaper and a two-bar electric heater in the fireplace.
Robinson and his wife used to live in the flat upstairs, which was reserved for the director, but since he became the Master of Magdalene College they have moved into accommodation there.
Despite the lack of money, Robinson describes the Fitzwilliam as a 'very acquisitive' museum. It has a large number of small endowments, which it uses as seed money to get external grants.
Robinson says it hardly ever misses a month applying to the Art Fund. But despite the protracted process of applying to various funding bodies, Robinson does not think there should be a single fund that museums can apply to.
'The advantage of having multiple streams is that if one closes another opens,' he says. 'There needs to be more money, but I don't necessarily think concentrating it is the answer.' He also thinks that for all its faults, the export bar system may be the best option there is.
'It could be worse, but the question is could it be better?' He continues: 'I don't have a simple answer to that. We have a reasonable system which reflects the rights of owners to dispose of property, and that has counted for a lot in this country. But museums are concerned that a lot of things are coming on to the market. There is a limit to how much public money is available.'
Robinson agrees with Nicholas Goodison, whose report for the Treasury on the issue was published in January last year. Goodison argued that the answer is to encourage private treaty sales, developing a sense of trust between public institutions and private owners: 'We need to accept the heritage of this country and the fact that items are often in private hands,' Robinson says.
'The Madonna of the Pinks is a classic example of a lack of consultation between owner and the institution where it was on view. It worries me that owners don't feel there is a great advantage in private treaty sales.'
But despite the problems, he does think that the state of collecting in British museums generally is improving. He says that when he came back to Britain in 1995 to take up his current post, having been the director of the Yale Center for British Art in the US, he discovered that collecting was not even on the agenda for many museums.
'I was very depressed at how many museums had given up on acquisition because of underfunding. Fortunately, it does seem in the past few years that one has grounds for optimism. For many museums acquisitions are their lifeblood, responsible for a lot of the electricity of the curatorial staff.'
Dressed in an olive-green suit, with a dark bow tie, purple shirt and a red handkerchief tucked neatly in his top pocket, the 61-year-old Robinson looks like an old-fashioned museum director full of a 1940s-esque bonhomie. But he also embraces modern ideas. Unlike some directors he is glad that the issue of disposal is back on the agenda, for example.
Robinson was born in Staffordshire in 1943, where his mother had been evacuated during the war. His father was a London businessman, but became a civilian casualty of the war when Robinson was 15 months old. As a result, he and his mother stayed in Staffordshire, where his mother was a school teacher and later headmistress.
He wasn't an avid museum-goer as a child and didn't think of himself as a visual person. When he went to university, at Clare College in Cambridge, he studied English. His interest in art was sparked by a trip to Italy during a summer holiday, but at that stage he still assumed he would follow his mother into some sort of teaching job.
After graduating he got a place to do an MA in the history of art at Yale. It was there that he decided he wanted a career in art history.
When he came back to Britain he started a PhD in Cambridge, but a job came up as an assistant keeper of paintings and drawings at the Fitzwilliam, which he applied for and got. He later became a keeper, before going to the Yale Center to be its director in 1981, staying for 14 years.
One of his tasks at the Yale Center was to help bring the museum closer to the university. In Cambridge, the Fitzwilliam has been increasingly integrated with the university since the 1970s, and Robinson has continued that process. All the curatorial staff are actively researching and also teach at the university.
And Robinson says that in the current climate, where Cambridge is under pressure to be more open, the relationship is one of 'growing interdependence'. 'For the first time the museum is seen as useful to the university,' he says. 'The university is under pressure to open up learning and the Fitzwilliam is a place where it can demonstrate it is looking to its wider public.'
He feels that museums in the US have addressed accessibility faster than those in the UK. 'There was a tendency in England to think of museums as passive repositories.
The public were expected to have the educational background to take themselves to the museum and to understand it when they got there. What we've learned from the US is that museums can do much more than that.'
This was the thinking underlying the Fitzwilliam's £12m extension, which opened in June last year. Robinson worked closely with the architect John Miller and Partners in the early stages of its design, visiting the practice's studio once or twice a month.
The extension comprises new gallery space, education rooms and a larger shop and cafe, but also serves as a modern, ground floor entrance, in stark contrast to the museum's original entrance, a grand portico perched at the top of stone stairs.
Robinson says it would be an exaggeration to say it has transformed the museum, but it has changed the message it is sending out.
'I probably sound like a dinosaur when talking about breaking down barriers, but I think a lot of people underestimate how forbidding traditional museums can be,' he says. 'The new entrance advertises that this is a public building that is open to everyone.
Access is a word that is used so much it has almost been debased of its meaning, but it is an important word. Not just physical access, but intellectual access, using objects as a window to knowledge.' mj
