Sir Hans Sloane

Sir Hans Sloane[edit]
Sir Hans Sloane
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 Anglo-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,
[10]
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. [11]
At that time, Sloane's collection consisted of around 71,000 objects of all kinds [12] 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.[13]
Foundation (1753)[edit]
On 7 June 1753, King George II gave his Royal Assent to the Act of Parliament which established
the British Museum.[b] 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[15] including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving manuscript
of Beowulf.[c]
Montagu House, c. 1715

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. [16] 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.[17]
Cabinet of curiosities (1753–1778)[edit]
The Rosetta Stone on display in the British Museum in 1874
The body of trustees decided on a converted 17th-century mansion, Montagu House, as a location

for the museum, which it bought from the Montagu family for £20,000. The trustees rejected
Buckingham House, which was later converted into the present day Buckingham Palace, on the
grounds of cost and the unsuitability of its location. [18][d]
With the acquisition of Montagu House, the first exhibition galleries and reading room for scholars
opened on 15 January 1759. [19] At this time, the largest parts of collection were the library, which took
up the majority of the rooms on the ground floor of Montagu House, and the natural history objects,
which took up an entire wing on the second state storey of the building. In 1763, the trustees of the
British Museum, under the influence of Peter Collinson and William Watson, employed the former
student of Carl Linnaeus, Daniel Solander, to reclassify the natural history collection according to the
Linnaean system, thereby making the museum a public centre of learning accessible to the full
range of European natural historians. [20] In 1823, King George IV gave the King's Library assembled
by George III,[21] and Parliament gave the right to a copy of every book published in the country,
thereby ensuring that the museum's library would expand indefinitely. During the few years after its
foundation the British Museum received several further gifts, including the Thomason Collection of
Civil War Tracts and David Garrick's library of 1,000 printed plays. The predominance of natural
history, books and manuscripts began to lessen when in 1772 the museum acquired for £8,410 its
first significant antiquities in Sir William Hamilton's "first" collection of Greek vases.[22]
Indolence and energy (1778–1800)[edit]
Entrance ticket to the British Museum, London 3 March 1790
From 1778, a display of objects from the South Seas brought back from the round-the-world
voyages of Captain James Cook and the travels of other explorers fascinated visitors with a glimpse
of previously unknown lands. The bequest of a collection of books, engraved gems, coins, prints and
drawings by Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode in 1800 did much to raise the museum's reputation; but
Montagu House became increasingly crowded and decrepit and it was apparent that it would be
unable to cope with further expansion.[23]
The museum's first notable addition towards its collection of antiquities, since its foundation, was by
Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), British Ambassador to Naples, who sold his collection of Greek
and Roman artefacts to the museum in 1784 together with a number of other antiquities and natural
history specimens. A list of donations to the museum, dated 31 January 1784, refers to the Hamilton
bequest of a "Colossal Foot of an Apollo in Marble". It was one of two antiquities of Hamilton's
collection drawn for him by Francesco Progenie, a pupil of Pietro Fabris, who also contributed a
number of drawings of Mount Vesuvius sent by Hamilton to the Royal Society in London.
Growth and change (1800–1825)[edit]
Left to Right: Montagu House, Townley Gallery and Sir Robert Smirke's west wing under construction, July
1828
The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus Room, 1920s
In the early 19th century the foundations for the extensive collection of sculpture began to be laid
and Greek, Roman and Egyptian artefacts dominated the antiquities displays. After the defeat of
the French campaign in the Battle of the Nile, in 1801, the British Museum acquired more Egyptian
sculptures and in 1802 King George III presented the Rosetta Stone – key to the deciphering of
hieroglyphs.[24] Gifts and purchases from Henry Salt, British consul general in Egypt, beginning with
the Colossal bust of Ramesses II in 1818, laid the foundations of the collection of Egyptian
Monumental Sculpture.[25] Many Greek sculptures followed, notably the first purpose-built exhibition
space, the Charles Towneley collection, much of it Roman sculpture, in 1805. In 1806, Thomas
Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803 removed the large
collection of marble sculptures from the Parthenon, on the Acropolis in Athens and transferred them
to the UK. In 1816 these masterpieces of western art were acquired by the British Museum by Act of
Parliament and deposited in the museum thereafter. [26] The collections were supplemented by
the Bassae frieze from Phigaleia, Greece in 1815. The Ancient Near Eastern collection also had its
beginnings in 1825 with the purchase of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities from the widow
of Claudius James Rich.[27]
In 1802 a buildings committee was set up to plan for expansion of the museum, and further
highlighted by the donation in 1822 of the King's Library, personal library of King George III's,
comprising 65,000 volumes, 19,000 pamphlets, maps, charts and topographical drawings.
The neoclassical architect, Sir Robert Smirke, was asked to draw up plans for an eastern
[28]
extension to the museum "... for the reception of the Royal Library, and a Picture Gallery over
it ..."[29] and put forward plans for today's quadrangular building, much of which can be seen today.
The dilapidated Old Montagu House was demolished and work on the King's Library Gallery began
in 1823. The extension, the East Wing, was completed by 1831. However, following the founding of
the National Gallery, London in 1824,[e] the proposed Picture Gallery was no longer needed, and the
space on the upper floor was given over to the Natural history collections.[30]
The first Synopsis of the British Museum was published in 1808. This described the contents of the
museum, and the display of objects room by room, and updated editions were published every few
years.
The largest building site in Europe (1825–1850)[edit]
The Grenville Library, 1875
As Sir Robert Smirke's grand neo-classical building gradually arose, the museum became a

construction site. The King's Library, on the ground floor of the East Wing, was handed over in 1827,
and was described as one of the finest rooms in London. Although it was not fully open to the
general public until 1857, special openings were arranged during The Great Exhibition of 1851.
In 1840, the museum became involved in its first overseas excavations, Charles Fellows's expedition
to Xanthos, in Asia Minor, whence came remains of the tombs of the rulers of ancient Lycia, among
them the Nereid and Payava monuments. In 1857, Charles Newton was to discover the 4th-century
BC Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In the 1840s and
1850s the museum supported excavations in Assyria by A.H. Layard and others at sites such
as Nimrud and Nineveh. Of particular interest to curators was the eventual discovery
of Ashurbanipal's great library of cuneiform tablets, which helped to make the museum a focus
for Assyrian studies.[31]
Sir Thomas Grenville (1755–1846), a trustee of the British Museum from 1830, assembled a library
of 20,240 volumes, which he left to the museum in his will. The books arrived in January 1847 in
twenty-one horse-drawn vans. The only vacant space for this large library was a room originally
intended for manuscripts, between the Front Entrance Hall and the Manuscript Saloon. The books
remained here until the British Library moved to St Pancras in 1998.
Collecting from the wider world (1850–1875)[edit]

The opening of the forecourt in 1852 marked the completion of Robert Smirke's 1823 plan, but
already adjustments were having to be made to cope with the unforeseen growth of the collections.
Infill galleries were constructed for Assyrian sculptures and Sydney Smirke's Round Reading Room,
with space for a million books, opened in 1857. Because of continued pressure on space the
decision was taken to move natural history to a new building in South Kensington, which would later
become the British Museum of Natural History.
Roughly contemporary with the construction of the new building was the career of a man sometimes
called the "second founder" of the British Museum, the Italian librarian Anthony Panizzi. Under his
supervision, the British Museum Library (now part of the British Library) quintupled in size and
became a well-organised institution worthy of being called a national library, the largest library in the
world after the National Library of Paris.[17] The quadrangle at the centre of Smirke's design proved to
be a waste of valuable space and was filled at Panizzi's request by a circular Reading Room of cast
iron, designed by Smirke's brother, Sydney Smirke.[32]
Until the mid-19th century, the museum's collections were relatively circumscribed but, in 1851, with
the appointment to the staff of Augustus Wollaston Franks to curate the collections, the museum
began for the first time to collect British and European medieval antiquities, prehistory, branching out
into Asia and diversifying its holdings of ethnography. A real coup for the museum was the purchase
in 1867, over French objections, of the Duke of Blacas's wide-ranging and valuable collection of
antiquities. Overseas excavations continued and John Turtle Wood discovered the remains of the
4th century BC Templ

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Sir Hans Sloane[edit]

Sir Hans Sloane

Montagu House, c. 1715

Cabinet of curiosities (1753–1778)[edit]

The Rosetta Stone on display in the British Museum in 1874

The body of trustees decided on a converted 17th-century mansion, Montagu House, as a location

Indolence and energy (1778–1800)[edit]

Entrance ticket to the British Museum, London 3 March 1790

Growth and change (1800–1825)[edit]

The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus Room, 1920s

The largest building site in Europe (1825–1850)[edit]

As Sir Robert Smirke's grand neo-classical building gradually arose, the museum became a

Collecting from the wider world (1850–1875)[edit]

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