British Museum

The British Museum in London is one of the world's largest and most important museums of human history and culture. It was established in 1753 and was based largely on the collections of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. The museum first opened to the public on 15 January 1759 in Montagu House in Bloomsbury, on the site of the current museum building.

The British Museum is home to over seven million objects from all continents illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginning to the present. Many of the artifacts are stored underneath the museum due to lack of space.

The present chairman is Sir John Boyd and its director is Neil MacGregor.

The British Museum, like the other main museums and art galleries in Britain, charges no admission fee. Admission charges, however, are levied for some temporary special exhibitions.

The British Museum offers a range of learning experiences for everyone including schools, families and adults, one of which is a Postgraduate Diploma that focuses on the classical and decorative arts of Asia.

History

Though principally a museum of cultural art objects and antiquities, today, the British Museum was founded as a "universal museum". This is reflected in the first bequest by Sir Hans Sloane, comprising some 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, extensive natural history specimens, prints by Albrecht Dürer and antiquities from Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle and Far East and the Americas. The Foundation Act, passed on 7 June 1753, added two other libraries to the Sloane collection. The Cottonian Library, assembled by Sir Robert Cotton, dated back to Elizabethan times and the Harleian library was the collection of the first and second Earls of Oxford. They were joined in 1757 by the Royal Library 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 copy of Beowulf.

The body of Trustees (which until 1963 was headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker of the House of Commons) decided on Montagu House as a location for the museum, which it bought from the Montagu family for £20,000. The Trustees rejected Buckingham House, on a site now occupied by Buckingham Palace, on the grounds of cost and the unsuitability of its location.

After its foundation the British Museum received several gifts, including the Thomason Library and David Garrick's library of 1,000 printed plays, but had few ancient relics and would have been unrecognisable to visitors of the modern museum. The first notable addition to the collection of antiquities was by Sir William Hamilton, British Ambassador to Naples, who sold his collection of Greek and Roman artifacts to the museum in 1782. In the early 19th century the foundations for the extensive collection of sculpture began to be laid. After the defeat of the French in the Battle of the Nile in 1801 the British Museum acquired more Egyptian sculpture and the Rosetta Stone. Many Greek sculptures followed, notably the Towneley collection in 1805 and the renowned Elgin Marbles in 1816.

The collection soon outgrew its surroundings and the situation became urgent with the donation in 1822 of King George III's personal library of 65,000 volumes, 19,000 pamphlets, maps, charts and topographical drawings to the museum. The dilapidated Old Montagu House was demolished in 1845 and replaced by a design by the neoclassical architect Sir Robert Smirke.

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 Antonio Panizzi. Under his supervision the British Museum Library quintupled in size and became a well-organised institution worthy of being called a national library. 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 son, Sydney Smirke. This is where Karl Marx famously carried out much of his research, and wrote some of his most important works.

The natural history collections were an integral part of the British Museum until their removal to the new British Museum (Natural History), now the Natural History Museum, in 1887. The ethnography collections were until recently housed in the short-lived Museum of Mankind in Piccadilly; they have now returned to Bloomsbury and the Department of Ethnography has been renamed the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.

The temporary exhibition Treasures of Tutankhamun, held by the British Museum in 1972, was the most successful in British history, attracting 1,694,117 visitors. In the same year the Act of Parliament establishing The British Library was passed, separating the collection of manuscripts and printed books from the British Museum. The Government suggested a site at St Pancras for the new British Library but the books did not leave the museum until 1997.

With the bookstacks in the central courtyard of the museum now empty, the process of demolition for Lord Foster's glass-roofed Great Court could begin. The Great Court, opened in 2000, while undoubtedly improving circulation around the museum, was criticised for having a lack of exhibition space at a time when the museum was in serious financial difficulties and many galleries were closed to the public. In 2002 the museum was even closed for a day when its staff protested about proposed redundancies. A few weeks later the theft of a small Greek statue was blamed on lack of security staff.

Controversy

It is a point of controversy whether museums should be allowed to possess artifacts taken from other countries, and the British Museum is a notable target for criticism. The Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes are among its most disputed collections, and organisations have been formed demanding the return of both sets of artifacts to their native countries of Greece and Nigeria respectively.

The British Museum has refused to return either set, or any of its other disputed items, 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 it from selling any of its valuable artifacts, even the ones not on display. Critics have particularly argued against the right of the British Museum to own objects which it does not share with the public.

Supporters of the Museum claim that it has provided protection for artifacts that may have otherwise been damaged or destroyed if they had been left in their original environments. While some critics have accepted this, they also argue that the artifacts should now be returned to their countries of origin if there is sufficient expertise and desire there to preserve them.

The British Museum continues to assert that it is an appropriate custodian and has an inalienable right to its disputed artifacts under British law.

The building

The Greek Revival façade facing Great Russell Street is a characteristic building of Sir Robert Smirke, with 44 columns in the Ionic order closely based on those of the temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor. The pediment over the main entrance is decorated by sculptures by Sir Richard Westmacott depicting The Rise of Civilisation, installed in 1852.

The Duveen Gallery housing the Elgin Marbles was designed by the American Beaux-Arts architect John Russell Pope. Although completed in 1938 it was hit by a bomb in 1940 and remained semi-derelict for 22 years before reopening in 1962.

The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court is a covered square at the centre of the British Museum designed by the architects Foster and Partners. The Great Court opened in December 2000 and is the largest covered square in Europe. The roof is a glass and steel construction with 1,656 panes of uniquely shaped glass panes. At the centre of the Great Court is the Reading Room vacated by the British Library, its functions now moved to St Pancras. The Reading Room is open to any member of the public who wishes to read there.

The collections

Highlights of the collections include:

The Elgin Marbles, carvings from the Athenian Parthenon
The Portland Vase
The Rosetta Stone
The Stein collection from Central Asia
The Clock Room
Works by Albrecht Dürer: 1 volume of sketches and 4 volumes of manuscripts
Egyptian Mummies
The Benin Bronzes
The Cyrus Cylinder and many other Persian artifacts
Anglo-Saxon artifacts from the Sutton Hoo burial
The Lewis Chessmen
The Mold cape (a Bronze age gold ceremonial cape)
The basalt statue Hoa Hakananai'a from Easter Island
The echo in the reading room, which Gerard Hoffnung recommended

The notorious Cupboard 55 in the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities, inaccessible by the public and known as "the Secretum", has a reputation for containing some of the most erotic objects in the British Museum. Though claiming to be from ancient cultures, many of the objects are Victorian fakes and are deemed unfit for public display on grounds of quality, rather than because of their supposed obscenity. In any case, the Museum's attitudes to material previously held to be 'obscene' has now changed, as shown by the Warren Cup.

Trivia

The British Museum, and especially the Reading Room, is a recurring setting in David Lodge's 1965 novel The British Museum Is Falling Down.

The British Museum is also seen in The Mummy Returns although not from the outside. This view is actually of University College London.

Galleries

Joseph E. Hotung Gallery (Asia)

Image:IndusValleySeals.JPG|Seals of the Indus Valley Civilization. Image:MathuraLionCapital.JPG|The Indo-Scythian Mathura lion capital, 1st century CE. Image:6thPillarOfAshoka.JPG|Fragment of the 6th Pillar Edict of Ashoka (238 BCE), in Brahmi, sandstone. Image:KanishkaCasket.JPG|The Kanishka casket, dated to 127 CE, with the Buddha surrounded by Brahma and Indra. Image:CrystalGoose.JPG|A Hamsa sacred goose reliquary, Gandhara, 1st century CE. Image:BimaranCasket.JPG|The Bimaran casket, Gandhara, 1st century CE. Image:EmaciatedBuddha.JPG|The Buddha as an ascetic. Gandhara, 2-3rd century CE.

Hellenistic galleries

Image:ScythianArchers.JPG|Gold clothing appliqué, showing two Scythian archers, 400-350 BCE. Probably from Kul Oba, Crimea. Image:PalmyraWoman.JPG|Funerary bust of a woman. Palmyra. Mid-late 2nd century CE.

External links

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