Museums: The Beginning of the Modern Museum (part 4 of 6)

“Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-ordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized?... A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.”

— D. H. Lawrence
Etruscan Places, Chapter 6 (1932).

The Ashmolean Museum:

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England is considered the first modern museum its origin being the collections of John Tradescant the elder and his son John Tradescant the younger. As its 1656 catalog shows, the Ashmolean was essentially a large Wonder Room.

The categorizing we expect in a museum occurred over time as the collection was used for teaching. Housed in its new building, completed in 1683, the collection was divided into departments overseen by separate curators and was open regularly to the public.


The British Museum:

Like the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford the British Museum began as a private collection, consisting of 70,000 various items, the library and the herbarium of physician and naturalist, Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). It was bequested to the country on the condition that 20,000 pounds be given to Sloan's heirs. Otherwise the collection would be sold.

An Act of Parliament in 1753 lead to the purchase of the collection and the establishment of the British Museum. The museum was supported only from funds raised by public lottery and an occasional infusion from Parliament to purchase specific items, such as and the sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens known as The Elgin Marbles, in 1816.








Detail of frieze from the Parthenon showing a captured centaur.
From A History of Ancient Sculpture by Lucy M. Mitchell (1883).

Once the Museum opened in 1759, the irregular nature of funding made it difficult to serve the public. Because of this, even though admission was free, entry was restricted for many years at a limit of sixty visitors a day. Unlimited daily admission did not come about until 1879. Since its founding the collection has grown to over 13 million objects housed at the British Museum, 70 million at the Natural History Museum and 150 million at the British Library.