Ashmolean Museum

“ The young lady is all that we shall have left, and the mop and duster of the last Almira or Loïzy will be stared at by generations of Bridgets and Noras as that famous head and foot of the lost bird are stared at in the Ashmolean Museum. ”

“ Wood (Athenæ, iv. 723) , confusing him with another Edward Lloyd from Kidwelly in Carmarthenshire, wrongly gives the date as 1687. He did not proceed to a degree, but in 1684 was appointed under-keeper of the recently established Ashmolean Museum, and in 1690, on the resignation of Dr. Robert Plot, he was appointed head keeper. He travelled much for the purpose of collecting specimens in natural history for the museum, and in 1693 he was employed by Dr. ”

“ It is noticeable what a real, although somewhat indiscriminating, interest the London merchants appear to have taken in the Library. Continual mention occurs not merely of books but of curiosities of all kinds, natural and artificial, which persons en [Pg 94] gaged in commerce, chiefly with the East Indies, sent as for a general repository. Most of these curiosities are now to be found, it is believed, in the Ashmolean Museum.
At some period between 1660 and 1667, i.e. during Clarendon's Chancellorship of the University, two volumes of MSS. notes and observations upon Josephus, by Sam. ”

“ He was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, but did not graduate; he received the degree of M.A. however in 1701. In 1690, after serving for six years as assistant, he succeeded R. Plot as keeper of the Ashmolean museum, a position which he retained until 1709. In 1699 he published Lithophylacii Britannici Ichnographia, in which he described and figured various fossils, personally collected or received from his friends, and these were arranged in cabinets in the museum. They were obtained from many parts of England, but mostly from the neighbourhood of Oxford. ”

“ So much the better for the student of antiquities, for, without denying that museums are eminently useful, it is certain that they deprive objects of a great deal of their interest and their power of suggesting ideas by detaching them from their surroundings. Moreover, it is not at all sure that these things, when they have been bought up and carried away, will ever be put in a place where anybody can see them who may have the wish to do so. And then, when a thing has been put into a museum, it becomes such labour and painfulness to look for it; and most of us are so lazy by nature. ”

“ It is never under any circumstances, however, justifiable to treat an object of art and one worthy of a place in a museum as though it were a part of the decoration of the museum. It may by its nature be a decoration to the room, but it must be so arranged that for light and for space and for general effect it is shown to its best advantage. To cut a piece of sculpture, a painting or a tapestry, as a layman might do, to make it fit a given spot in a museum is to commit a crime. ”

“ Year after year and age after age it accumulates—this evidence and monument of intellectual activity—piling itself up in vast collections, which it needs a lifetime even to catalogue, and through which the uncultured walk as the idle do through the British Museum, with no very strong indignation against Omar who burned the library at Alexandria. ”

“ The wholesale exhibition of one class of objects leads to two things: a false impression on the part of the public as to the importance of that particular thing in the daily life of the people of ancient times, and a fatigue of mind and eye which must be avoided if the public is to benefit from the collection. To the great mass of museum visitors the exact position of a handle on a cup or the precise number of geometrical figures used in a design are of no possible interest. ”

“ Following the long lane which ascends between a wing of the palace and its garden wall, Narcisse and Pierre at last reached the Museum of Antiquities. Ah! what a museum it is, with galleries innumerable, a museum compounded of three museums, the Pio-Clementino, Chiaramonti, and the Braccio-Nuovo, and containing a whole world found beneath the soil, then exhumed, and now glorified in full sunlight. For more than two hours Pierre went from one hall to another, dazzled by the masterpieces, bewildered by the accumulation of genius and beauty. ”

“ An American had offered £12,000 for the despised statue, which no one would buy at the original sale, the same statue which the Louvre gladly acquired for £10,000.
Museums will pay almost anything for fine specimens that throw some light on past ages. They will willingly fit out special expeditions to various parts of the world. Often museums cooperate in working a site, as in the case of the Temple of the Moon God at Ur, in Mesopotamia, which has been worked by the University Museum of Philadelphia and the British Museum. ”

“ In a museum the collection is the essential; the building is the mere accident of the surroundings of the collection, and it should completely conform to all the requirements. Yet can it be believed that, even in the last year or two, enormous national museums—as at Cairo and131 Brussels—have been built without the smallest regard to the collection, or the opinions of the curators? The result at Cairo is the most deplorable sacrifice of the art and history of a great country to the follies and childish vanity of an incompetent and unsympathetic architect. ”

“ I have no hesitation in saying that the craze for recklessly bringing away unique antiquities from Egypt to be exhibited in western museums for the satisfaction of the untravelled man, is the most pernicious bit of folly to be found in the whole broad realm of archæological misbehaviour.
A museum has three main justifications for its existence. In the first place, like a home for lost dogs, it is a repository for stray objects. No curator should endeavour to procure for his museum any antiquity which could be safely exhibited on its original site and in its original position. ”

“ THOUGH the natural-history portion of the Marshlands Museum grew so rapidly that it threatened to overflow the cabinet, there were very few antiquities in the collection, a Roman lamp, an Egyptian scarab, a few old coins, and a Georgian snuff-box making up the whole of the scanty store.
"I wish we could get a few really ancient things," said Cathy one day, as she dusted and tidied the shelves. "Arrow-heads, I mean, and spindle-whorls, and bronze brooches, and all those delightful finds you hear of people digging up out of barrows. ”

“ It has been, and doubtless for some centuries to come will be, a matter of regret that the unrivalled collection called the British Museum has not, after the incalculable labour bestowed, and the vast sums of money spent upon it, found a home more worthy of its invaluable contents than the present building. Of this huge pile—an irregular oblong—but little appeals to the eye, less to the power of discussion. The Eastern and Western Wings still remain partially exposed to view in all their normal hideousness of yellow brick, unadorned by aught save a few meagre mouldings. ”

“ By and by, when the whirligig of time has brought on another revenge, the museum itself becomes a dust-heap, and remains so till after long ages it is rediscovered, and valued as belonging to a neo-rubbish age—containing, perhaps, traces of a still older paleo-rubbish civilization. ”

“ That frail structure, crowded from garret to cellar with seeming rubbish, with boxes, cases, barrels, casks still unpacked and piled one above the other, held for him the treasure out of which he would give form and substance to the dream of his boyhood and the maturer purpose of his manhood. The hope of creating a great museum intelligently related in all its parts, reflecting nature, and illustrating the history of the animal kingdom in the past and the present, had always tempted his imagination. ”

“ It is a building just out of the cathedral plaza, and is approached through a pretty courtyard filled with palms and flowering shrubs. But within is the most melancholy medley and muddle which it is possible to conceive. With opportunities unexampled, with a wealth of treasures, the very finest of all Aztec and Mayan relics, the curators, if one must misuse the word so sadly, have proved themselves about as fit to arrange and govern a national museum as schoolboys. There is literally no order; apparently no intelligence at all has been exercised in the cataloguing of the exhibits ”

“ Religion tames the savage; Paganism makes him a crouching sensualist; the Egyptian sees a God in the stars of heaven; and then the mathematician, the musician, the poet, and the painter set to work, and these prophets of mysterious beauties realise civilised mankind. The visitor enters the museum, after ascending a noble flight of steps, by a massive carved oak door, into a fine entrance hall, the ceiling of which is highly coloured, and the general decoration of which is Grecian Ionic. ”

“ A great museum in the present state of the public mind is simply an exhibition of the possible modes of doing wrong in art, and an accumulation of uselessly multiplied ugliness in misunderstood nature. Our own museum [Pg 127] at Oxford is full of distorted skulls, and your Sheffield ironwork department will necessarily contain the most barbarous abortions that human rudeness has ever produced with human fingers. The capitals of the iron shafts in any railway station, for instance, are things to make a man wish—for shame of his species—that he had been born a dog or a bee. ”

“ Not anywhere in France are there dirtier and more crooked streets, not anywhere such motley array of shops amid the filth, red turbans and meat, bread and blocks, old coins and silks. Within the museum itself are collected more odd scraps of antiquity than can be found elsewhere together; there are lead pipes and stone fountains, old inscriptions and iron spikes, and the noblest monument of all is a female head that has no nose ”

“ Mr. Pennant then proceeds, more immediately to our purpose, to observe, “No one is ignorant of the magnificent and instructive museum, exhibited in this house by the late sir Ashton Lever. It was the most astonishing collection of the subjects of natural history ever collected, in so short a space, by any individual. To the disgrace of our kingdom, after the first burst of wonder was over, it became neglected; and when it was offered to the public, by the chance of a guinea lottery, only eight thousand out of thirty-six thousand tickets were sold. ”

“ No other qualities can possibly atone for defects of lighting in a museum. No building with a bad light can be called properly a museum; it may be an architect’s triumph, a civic ornament, a costly patchwork, a marvel of folly, but a museum it is not, if it is unfit for the first requirements of a collection. ”

“ It was as it were the final sickness of an aged man who had weathered many storms and whose recuperative power had hitherto risen to every occasion, at last however the final crisis comes and all is over. But that golden era of Assyrian art, so brief and short-lived, has nevertheless been immortalized by the artists of that day in those stone slabs which now form one of the most precious possessions of the British Museum. ”

“ But to ensure the fullest knowledge, and the most complete preservation of things, in the long run, should be the real aim. To raid the whole of past ages, and put all that we think effective into museums, is only to ensure that such things will perish in course of time. A museum is only a temporary place. There is not one storehouse in the world that has lasted a couple of thousand years. Only two or three bronze statues have come down to us from classical times preserved by each generation. ”

“ Here is this dry-looking archaeological museum, with antipathetic custodians at the door who refuse to get change for twenty-lira pieces: nothing could be more unpromising than they or their building; and yet you find yourself instantly among countless vestiges of a past people who had risen to power and crumbled again before Christ was born—but at a time when man was so vastly more sensitive to beauty than he now is that every appliance for daily life was the work of an artist. Well, a collection like this demands days and days of patient examination, and one has only a few hours. ”

“ The first is that an art museum is of the greatest value to a community when its collections embrace both the major and minor arts of all countries and all times. The second is that the standard must be high. It would be idle to pretend that every object in our collection is a masterpiece of the highest order, but it is better to have an ideal, which may not be wholly realized, than to have none. ”

“ The want of a collection of the early antiquities of this country has long been the greatest reproach which foreigners have been able to make against the British Museum. An opportunity of removing this has lately presented itself by an offer to the trustees of the well-known and probably unique collection, The Faussett Museum. ”

“ Many very beautiful things have, from time to time, been sent there—pictures, collections, priceless vases; and I am sure that those visitors who brought with them the sense of beauty and feeling for artistic work which comes of culture, have carried away memories and lessons which will last them for a lifetime. On the other hand, to those who visit the Museum chiefly in order to see the people, it has long been painfully evident that the folk who do not bring that sense with them go away carrying nothing of it home with them. ”