Sumner is on the steering group for the National Gallery’s network for pre-1900 European Paintings. She is also a trustee of the Methodist Art Collection of Modern Art and a member of the Academic Advisory Council for the Ironbridge Trust.
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts is one of only two public galleries in the UK founded by a woman (the other is Bath’s Holburne Museum). But after Dame Martha Constance Hattie Barber created the Barber Institute in December 1932, it was another 75 years before it had its first female director, Ann Sumner.
Sumner follows in the footsteps of some big personalities at the Barber, most notably its founding director, Thomas Bodkin, who was there from 1935 until 1952. But the gallery’s fifth director is keen to stamp her personality on the institution, which is part of the University of Birmingham, and leave it with a lasting legacy.
She is planning to launch a campaign in 2012, the 80th anniversary of the institute’s creation, to raise funds to expand and improve the gallery. No cost has been put on the plans yet, but it will involve moving the music library out of the building and creating a dedicated exhibition gallery, cafe and improved learning facilities.
“What you have at the Barber is superb collections and a wonderful building,” Sumner says. “The challenge is to see how we can raise the profile and modernise in such a way that we don’t lose any of the fantastic atmosphere of the building.”
The Barber has an excellent collection, which has been put together by acquisition since the 1930s. It includes paintings by old masters such as Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini, Veronese, Rubens and Van Dyck. It also has a strong range of impressionist works by artists including Monet, Manet, Renoir and Degas.
The institute’s ability to acquire major works stems from its foundation by Lady Barber. As the wife of a successful property developer she had a sizeable fortune; all of this was left to the institute’s trustees when she died four months after setting up the organisation in 1932.
The gallery still buys artworks, and Sumner’s first major acquisition as director was a 1750s portrait of Gustavus Hamilton, 2nd Viscount Boyne, by the female artist Rosalba Carriera and bought for £525,000 in February last year.
Another portrait by a female artist, Marie Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun’s painting of Countess Golovine, is among Sumner’s favouite works in the Barber collection. It is also a favourite of her husband, who studied at the university in the 1970s. Sumner’s first encounter with the Barber was a result of visiting him.
Source of inspiration
She subsequently got to know the Barber well as it was one of the galleries she went to while studying at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
Her first professional contact with the Barber was while negotiating a loan of Thomas Gainsborough’s The Harvest Wagon for an exhibition she was developing at the Holburne Museum in Bath.
Sumner was born in Bath and did some voluntary work at the Holburne, also a university museum, before leaving for the Courtauld. And undertaking voluntary work at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge while doing her PhD helped her to get a first job, at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
She then returned to Bath to become an assistant curator at the Holburne and later moved to the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, another university museum. From there she returned to London to work at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
“Dulwich Picture Gallery was one of those places, like the Barber, that I had visited as a student at the Courtauld and thought: ‘That is the kind of place where I’d like to work.’”
Sumner has moved about a lot during her career, and left Dulwich to become a senior curator at Harewood House in Leeds. She returned to Bath to take up a more senior position at the Holburne, where she was involved in the early plans for the redevelopment of the museum, which is to be unveiled in May. Sumner then spent seven years as the head of fine art at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.
“I had a Welsh-speaking grandmother and Welsh-speaking aunties,” says Sumner. “My mother used to take me to the national museum when I was a child and it was a real dream come true to work there.”
Sumner’s broad experience has not only provided her with excellent contacts, but also given her a clear idea of what she wants to achieve at the Barber and how she wants to achieve it.
One big change she has made is expanding the exhibitions programme. Previously it was mostly based on the works from the collection, although the year Sumner joined, her predecessor, Richard Verdi, had staged an exhibition that explored the role of the parrot in art.
Spotlight on tennis
Sumner’s ideas are perhaps a little more mainstream; this year’s key Barber exhibition, Court on Canvas (27 May-18 September), will trace tennis as a subject in art from the 1870s through to the present day. It will include work by John Lavery, LS Lowry and David Hockney, and will even feature the 1970s Athena Tennis Girl poster.
Sumner says: “Court on Canvas is based on local historical links, and the fact that the first-ever game of tennis was played here in Edgbaston and one of the earliest clubs is here. The other claim to fame is the Athena tennis poster was photographed here. We really hope that it will be a major opportunity to raise the Barber’s profile and bring in new audiences.”
Sumner believes the exhibition programme is key to broadening the type of people who come to the Barber and she says visitor numbers have been rising because of it. Since joining she has overseen two photography shows, while there is also a long-running temporary exhibition, Sacred and Profane (until 18 January 2012) featuring items from the Myers Eton College Collection of Egyptian Antiquities.
Sumner says the temporary exhibition programme is also a good way to foster links with university departments. An example is the Jack Kerouac: Back On the Road exhibition (3 December 2008-28 January 2009), which was organised in collaboration with the department of American and Canadian Studies and featured the original manuscript scroll of the writer’s seminal novel, On the Road.
Importance of collaboration
Sumner is keen to emphasise the importance of the university to the Barber and how it is a mutually beneficial relationship.
“We are part of the university, which is very lucky in that the university owns and maintains the building and we work very closely with all the others who use the building, such as the history of art department and the music department. It is a very harmonious arrangement and it is great for students coming here to study that they have this fantastic facility.”
Sumner is directly involved with university students in her role as professor of fine arts and curatorial practice, which she does in addition to being the Barber director. She says teaching was one of the attractions of Birmingham and she wishes she had time to do more of it.
Sumner also sees partnerships outside the gallery as being crucial to its development. She has worked collaboratively throughout her career, and this is continuing at the Barber.
An exchange of exhibitions with the Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, is among the Barber’s partnerships. This has seen the Barber host A Rage for the Lakes: Lake District Views (until 9 January) and Abbot Hall host a show featuring some of the Barber’s old master and German expressionist works. Sumner says the idea for the exchange came out of a visit to the Lake District with the Friends of the Barber.
She is also looking further afield, to Chicago in the US. Birmingham and Chicago are twinned as official second cities, and the Barber and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago will exchange exhibitions in 2013.
With all Sumner’s ambitious plans, you could be forgiven for thinking she has forgotten about the economic downturn: this is not the case. The Barber is in a stronger position than some university museums because it received only 14% (£154,000) of its income from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) in 2009-10.
A cut from Hefce will have an impact, but the Barber gets about 68% of its income from the Henry Barber Trust, although that has been affected by the impact of the economic downturn on its investments.
Whatever happens with the Barber’s funding, Sumner says she wants to be ready for a serious fundraising campaign to support the redevelopment of the institute. She has seen how projects have transformed places such as the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
“Cuts are going to come and we are going to have to prepare for them, and we are looking at things like opening hours,” she says. “But there is a lot of potential here and I really believe we have a collection that absolutely deserves to be really well interpreted and to have all the modern facilities that other art galleries enjoy.”
Presumably the gallery’s founder, Lady Barber, would have agreed with this.
Ann Sumner was born in Bath and read history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She took a PhD at Newnham College, University of Cambridge.
Sumner began her career at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and has held curatorial positions at the Holburne Museum, University of Bath; Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester; Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; Harewood House Trust, Leeds; and the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, where she was the head of fine art for seven years prior to her appointment at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham.
Her specialist areas of interest are 17th-century British portraiture and miniature painting, 18th-century British portraiture and landscape painting, and French 19th-century painting, as well as the art of Wales.
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham was founded in 1932. Its founder, Dame Martha Constance Hattie Barber, stipulated that she wanted the institute to be used “in perpetuity by the university for the study and encouragement of art and music”, and that its collection should be “of that standard of quality required by the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection”.
The gallery opened in July 1939.
Today it houses a collection of some 170 paintings, including: works by old masters such as Botticelli, Rubens, Bellini and Poussin; 18th- and 19th-century works by British greats such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable, Turner and Rossetti; and impressionist and late 19th/early 20th-century works by Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Whistler, Gauguin and Magritte.
The institute’s permanent collection is owned and governed by the Henry Barber Trust, which funds acquisitions for the collection as well as its conservation and management. The trust also contributes to the programme of exhibitions, concerts and events.
The Barber Institute building is owned by the University of Birmingham. It contains the Barber Concert Hall and practice rooms, the Barber Lecture Theatre, and separate Fine Art and Music libraries. Home to the university’s department of history of art, it is also used for concerts, rehearsals and examinations by the department of music.
The Barber’s total income for 2009-10 was £1,066,000, comprising: £724,000 from the Henry Barber Trust; £154,000 from Hefce; £60,000 net trading income; and £128,000 from other income (grant income, sponsorship, VAT rebates, etc). The University of Birmingham also contributed £498,000 towards costs, primarily to pay for building maintenance and energy consumption.