Creating a Great Museum: Early Collectors and The British Museum

Creating a Great Museum: Early Collectors and The British Museum
Marjorie Caygill

Seminar Introduction

The British Museum

Holy thorn reliquary.

Between private collectors and public museums there frequently exists a relationship of mutually advantageous dependence. Its origins could be said to go back to the establishment of The British Museum in 1753, as the first national, public and secular museum in the world, and it was nurtured by the subsequent formation of similar institutions. Three years after The British Museum{A146}s foundation when the Trustees agreed to institute a record of donations--the {A145}Book of Presents{A146}--it was noted in the archives:

Among the many and great advantages, which must necessarily accrue from the establishment of the British Museum, this may justly be esteemed not the least considerable; that it provides a safe and lasting repository for curiosities of every kind, whether of art or nature, accessible to all persons in their researches into any parts of useful knowledge.

In this seminar, Marjorie Caygill, historian for The British Museum, introduces us to some of the great British collectors of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, whose appetites for acquisition have been of great benefit to the viewing public ever since. Rather than a definitive study of English collecting, or a complete list of collectors whose donations have enriched The British Museum, this seminar provides interesting vignettes on the lives of several collectors, and attempts to address the question, 'What is a collector?' What emerges is also a portrait of collecting itself--its passions and eccentricities--as well as the diminishing opportunities in our day for vast accumulation of materials by a single individual.

Learning Objectives

Understand why Sir Hans Sloane has been described as being 'in the Enlightenment first team'.
Define the relationship between collectors and museums.
Specify the differences between 18th and 19th century collectors and collections.
Comprehend the diversity of the Museum's collections, and consider whether the tastes of the museum-going public have changed.

Sessions

Session 1	Sir Hans Sloane, Founder of The British Museum
Session 2	The Magna Carta, Lindisfarne Gospels and Other Treasures
Session 3	Rare Birds: Female Collectors and The British Museum
Session 4	The Rothschilds
Session 5	Quantity versus Quality among the Collectors
Contributors

Credits

Copyright The British Museum.

Technical Requirements

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