Today, The Morgans and The Grandma have decided to enjoy one of the most impressive museums in the world, the British Museum.
The family was very excited about this visit and they were all thinking about what souvenir they could take home from the Museum without having to go through the shop. The Grandma loves Rosetta Stone and the Sutton Hoo Helmet. The British Museum
is a public institution dedicated to human history, art and culture and
it is considered one of the most important museums of the world thanks
to its more than two hundred thirty million objects.
The British Museum opened on a day like today in 1759 and The Grandma wants to commemorate this event talking about the Museum and its history.
The British Museum, in the Bloomsbury area of London, United Kingdom, is a public institution dedicated to human history, art and culture.
Its permanent collection of some eight million works is among the
largest and most comprehensive in existence, having been widely sourced
during the era of the British Empire. It documents the story of human
culture from its beginnings to the present. It was the first public
national museum in the world.
The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane.
It first opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House,
on the site of the current building. Its expansion over the following
250 years was largely a result of expanding British colonisation and has
resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first
being the Natural History Museum in 1881.
In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum,
but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same
Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997. The museum is a
non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital,
Culture, Media and Sport, and as with all national museums in the UK it
charges no admission fee, except for loan exhibitions.
Its
ownership of some of its most famous objects originating in other
countries is disputed and remains the subject of international
controversy, most notably in the case of the Parthenon Marbles.
Although today principally a museum of cultural art objects and antiquities, the British Museum was founded as a universal museum. Its foundations lie in the will of the Irish physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), a London-based doctor and scientist from Ulster.
During the course of his lifetime, and particularly after he married the widow of a wealthy Jamaican planter, Sloane
gathered a large collection of curiosities and, not wishing to see his
collection broken up after death, he bequeathed it to King George II,
for the nation, for a sum of £20,000. At that time, Sloane's
collection consisted of around 71,000 objects of all kinds including
some 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, extensive natural history
specimens including 337 volumes of dried plants, prints and drawings
including those by Albrecht Dürer and antiquities from Sudan, Egypt,
Greece, Rome, the Ancient Near and Far East and the Americas.
On 7 June 1753, King George II gave his Royal Assent to the Act of Parliament which established the British Museum. The British Museum Act 1753 also added two other libraries to the Sloane
collection, namely the Cottonian Library, assembled by Sir Robert
Cotton, dating back to Elizabethan times, and the Harleian Library, the
collection of the Earls of Oxford. They were joined in 1757 by the Old Royal Library, now the Royal manuscripts, assembled by various British monarchs. Together these four foundation collections included many of the most treasured books now in the British Library including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf.
The British Museum was the first of a new kind of museum -national, belonging to neither church nor king, freely open to the public and aiming to collect everything.
Sloane's
collection, while including a vast miscellany of objects, tended to
reflect his scientific interests. The addition of the Cotton and Harley
manuscripts introduced a literary and antiquarian element and meant that
the British Museum now became both National Museum and library.
By the last years of the 19th century, The British Museum's
collections had increased to the extent that its building was no longer
large enough. In 1895 the trustees purchased the 69 houses surrounding
the museum with the intention of demolishing them and building around
the west, north and east sides of the museum. The first stage was the
construction of the northern wing beginning 1906.
All the
while, the collections kept growing. Emil Torday collected in Central
Africa, Aurel Stein in Central Asia, D.G. Hogarth, Leonard Woolley and
T. E. Lawrence excavated at Carchemish.
Around this
time, the American collector and philanthropist J Pierpont Morgan
donated a substantial number of objects to the museum, including William
Greenwell's collection of prehistoric artefacts from across Europe
which he had purchased for £10,000 in 1908. Morgan had also acquired a
major part of Sir John Evans's coin collection, which was later sold to
the museum by his son John Pierpont Morgan Junior in 1915.
In 1918, because of the threat of wartime bombing, some objects were evacuated via the London Post Office Railway to Holborn, the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth) and a country house near Malvern.
On the return of antiquities from wartime storage in 1919 some objects were found to have deteriorated. A conservation laboratory was set up in May 1920 and became a permanent department in 1931. It is today the oldest in continuous existence. In 1923, the British Museum welcomed over one million visitors.
Today
the museum no longer houses collections of natural history, and the
books and manuscripts it once held now form part of the independent British Library.
The museum
nevertheless preserves its universality in its collections of artefacts
representing the cultures of the world, ancient and modern. The original
1753 collection has grown to over 13 million objects at the British Museum, 70 million at the Natural History Museum and 150 million at the British Library.
The
Round Reading Room, which was designed by the architect Sydney Smirke,
opened in 1857. For almost 150 years researchers came here to consult
the museum's vast library. The Reading Room closed in 1997 when the
national library (the British Library) moved to a new building at St Pancras. Today it has been transformed into the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Centre.
This department covers
all levels of education, from casual visitors, schools, degree level and
beyond. The museum's various libraries hold in excess of 350,000 books,
journals and pamphlets covering all areas of the museum's collection.
Also the
general museum archives which date from its foundation in 1753 are
overseen by this department; the individual departments have their own
separate archives and libraries covering their various areas of
responsibility, which can be consulted by the public on application.
The
Anthropology Library is especially large, with 120,000 volumes. However,
the Paul Hamlyn Library, which had become the central reference library
of the British Museum and the only library there freely
open to the general public, closed permanently in August 2011. The
website and online database of the collection also provide increasing
amounts of information.
It is a point of controversy whether museums should be allowed to possess artefacts taken from other countries, and the British Museum is a notable target for criticism.
The Elgin Marbles, Benin Bronzes, Ethiopian Tabots and the Rosetta Stone
are among the most disputed objects in its collections, and
organisations have been formed demanding the return of these artefacts
to their native countries of Greece, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Egypt
respectively. Parthenon Marbles claimed by Greece were also claimed by
UNESCO among others for restitution. From 1801 to 1812, Elgin's agents
took about half of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon, as well as
sculptures from the Propylaea and Erechtheum.
In
recent years, controversies pertaining to reparation of artefacts taken
from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing during the Anglo-French invasion
of China in 1860 have also begun to surface. Victor Hugo condemned the
French and British for their plundering.
The British Museum
and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among others, have been asked since
2009 to open their archives for investigation by a team of Chinese
investigators as a part of an international mission to document lost
national treasures. However, there have been fears that the United
Kingdom may be asked to return these treasures.
The British Museum has refused to return these artefacts, stating that the restitutionist
premise, that whatever was made in a country must return to an original
geographical site, would empty both the British Museum and the other
great museums of the world.
The museum has also argued that the British Museum Act of 1963
legally prevents any object from leaving its collection once it has
entered it. Nevertheless, it has returned items such as the Tasmanian
Ashes after a 20-year-long battle with Australia.
The British Museum
continues to assert that it is an appropriate custodian and has an
inalienable right to its disputed artefacts under British law.
In 2016, the British Museum
moved its bag searches to marquees in the front courtyard and beside
the rear entrance. This has been criticised by heritage groups as
out-of-character with the historic building. The British Museum clarified
that the change was purely logistical to save space in the main museum
entrance and did not reflect any escalation in threat.
It is a standing source of astonishment
and amusement to visitors that the British Museum
has so few British things in it: that it is a museum about
the world as seen from Britain rather than a history
focused on these islands.
Neil MacGregor
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