A loan in
The Academy is delighted to welcome a new addition to the portraits in the Duke’s Hall – that of the British musician and composer Sir Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley (1825-1899) when a child, at the keyboard. This has been lent for an initial period of seven years by The Ouseley Trust. The artist is John Lucas.

Ouseley’s father, the orientalist and ambassador and amateur musician Sir Gore Ouseley, was one of the first directors of the Royal Academy of Music. Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley was born on 12 August 1825. He was named after his godfathers, Frederick, Duke of York, and Arthur, Duke of Wellington. After a private education, he attended Oxford University and, in 1849, was ordained. In 1855 he succeeded Sir Henry Bishop as Professor of Music at Oxford. Concerned by the then- prevailing standards of choral music in the Church of England, in 1856 he founded at his own expense St Michael's College in Tenbury, whose aims were to 'promise a course of training, and to form a model, for the daily choral services of the Church in these realms, and, for the furtherance of this object, to receive, educate and train boys in religious, secular and musical knowledge'. Ouseley was also an antiquarian, collector and composer of hymns, as well as an expert on organs, and the first elected President of the Royal Musical Association and of the Royal College of Organists. 

A child prodigy, he was at five said to have uttered 'Papa blows his nose on G' and that 'the clock struck in B minor'. 'The Harmonicon' (May 1833) published a march by him, written when aged six. The editor, William Ayrton, wrote that he had been reading Daines Barrington's accounts of Mozart, Samuel Wesley and William Crotch and other prodigies but that none approached the phenomenon which he himself had seen with Ouseley, who is said to have composed an opera at the age of seven and, when aged six, had played a duet on the piano with Felix Mendelssohn, who was a guest of his family. Ouseley, who succeeded to the baronetcy when he was twenty, was later himself to become a Director and Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Music.

This portrait joins the wonderful eighteenth-century paintings of Crotch (by Sir William Beechey and John Sanders) and Wesley (by John Russell) as children, as well as that of Charles Wesley, in the Duke’s Hall.

A loan out
The three drawings from the Foyle Menuhin Archive of the violinist Nicolò Paganini by Sir Edwin Landseer were lent to an exhibition at Simon Dickinson Fine Art to accompany the launch of Richard Ormond’s book titled ‘Edwin Landseer, The Private Sketches’ (Orion Press).

Other news
A further three-hundred early nineteenth-century sheet music titles, mostly British but with some French and other European, have been catalogued into both Apollo and the main Library catalogue. Digitisation of the covers should be complete by the end of the new term, and the subject content of the images will be searchable then. 

Images from the McCann Collection relating to historic performers of Wagnerian roles and further items relating to Giacomo Puccini are the subject of two small displays in the Academy’s Patrons Room.
Six individual information leaflets relating to the iconography of Beethoven held within Apollo are now available on the Apollo tours section of the website.

Following the extensive building works over the summer, new lightboxes were created for the etched and engraved glass panels by David Peace originally installed in 1978, and the panels are to be re-instated so that Milton’s lines from ‘L’Allegro’, so beautifully worked by David Peace, will be visible to all for the first time in decades.