Museums: A Little Left-over Wonder (part 6 of 6)

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery everyday. Never lose a holy curiosity."

— Albert Einstein

Today there are about 8,300 museums in the United States and, according to the two-volume 2005 edition of "Museums of the World", over 41,600 museums in 199 countries around the world. Most are what we expect a modern museum to be. However, there are a few Wonder Rooms, such as The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. It is one of these places which peaks our curiosity and makes our skin stand-up in anticipation and surprise.

For those who would like to examine an online cabinet of curiosity, visit the Museum of Dust.

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.

Museums: An American Wonder Room (part 3 of 6)

“Whoso would learn wisdom, let him enter here!”

— Charles Wilson Peale
Sign above the door of the Peale Museum in Philadelphia

On July 18, 1786 Charles Willson Peale opened his museum in Philadelphia to the public. Like most museums of the day, it was a private collection. Peale was best known for his portraits of important figures of the Revolutionary War and early Republic. However he was interested in diverse fields of natural history, as expected of educated men of his time.

Peale's motivation in establishing a museum was the belief that an educated populace was necessary to consolidate and advance the democracy won as a result of the American Revolution. His inspiration had occurred three years earlier when creating illustrations of Mastodon fossils for his friend Dr. John Morgan, a co-founder of the first medical school in America and a founding member of the American Philosophical Society.

Charles Willson Peale, self-portrait (1822)
Peale inviting guests into his museum
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The George W. Elkins Collection

The original Museum housed Peale’s portraits of Revolutionary War luminaries mounted high above display cases holding 90 species of stuffed and mounted mammals, 700 species of birds and 4,000 insects, along with minerals and various strange and wondrous artifacts. Peale’s Philadelphia museum eventually occupied parts of two buildings including three rooms at Independence Hall one of which was the first-floor Assembly Room where the Declaration of Independence had been signed.


Front room of Peale's Museum, ink and watercolor study (1822)


In time Peale's Museum housed the specimens collected by the Lewis and Clark Expedition as well as Native American cultural artifacts. The highlight was a mounted 11-foot high Mammoth skeleton, which had been excavated in 1801 by Peale from a farm in the Hudson River Valley of New York.

In 1810, Charles Willson Peale retired from his work at the museum, leaving its management and responsibility to his sons. In 1814 a second museum "Peale's Baltimore Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts" was established by his son Rembrandt Peale. Eventually there would be a third museum in New York City as well.

The museum in Baltimore was designed by noted architect Robert Cary Long, Sr. and was the first building in America built as a public museum. Housed in this stately three-story red brick Georgian style building, the museum was described in an early newspaper announcement as an “elegant Rendezvous for taste, curiosity and leisure.”

Announcement of mammoth skeleton

on display at Peale's Museum

Despite high hopes and ideals creditors foreclosed on the building in 1829 at which time the exhibits were moved to another location and the structure became Baltimore’s City Hall.




George Washington
As he would have looked in 1772
Painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1784
Washington-Custis-Lee Collection,
Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia


The downfall of the Peale Museum empire was brought about by competition from P. T. Barnum who had opened his own dime museum in New York in 1834. Less than 10 years later a successful Barnum purchased the contents of Peale’s New York City museum. In 1849 he opened a museum in Philadelphia where Peale, mounted a strong competition. This proved disastrous to Peale. The museum closed and its contents were sold by the sheriff. Barnum and his friend Moses Kimball purchased most of Peale's collection and divided it between Barnum's American Museum in New York and Kimball's Museum in Boston.

P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City

Most of the Peale Museum artifacts displayed at Barnum’s American Museum in New York City were destroyed when the building burned down in 1865. However some of the collection survived and is held at the Museum of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

One hundred years after the Peale's Baltimore Museum closed the grand old building that had housed it was rescued from proposed demolition. In 1931 it became the Municipal Museum of Baltimore. The Museum underwent a major renovation in 1979 and re-opened two years later with a focus on the history of Baltimore rather than art. In 1985 the facility became part of the City Life Museums system. However, the revamped museum had no more success than Peale’s original museum and closed due to financial difficulties in June of 1997.

(Read about The Beginnings of the Modern Museum in the next post on Museums)

Museums: Wonder Rooms (part 2 of 6)

"An ideal museum show would… be a mating of Brideshead Revisited... with House & Garden…, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had."

— Robert Hughes

In Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire the concept of museum disappeared. While the powerful might accumulate art and artifacts, the general population could only view an ancient relic in a church or during a religious procession.

Not until the Renaissance did the interest in and ability to accumulate collections of non-essential objects begin to grow. Aristocrats, merchants, artists, alchemists and other educated successful citizens began gathering unusual items that interested them. These were stored and displayed in special Wonder Rooms (Wunderkammer). A person of lesser means might only have a single Cabinet of Curiosities in his house to hold such items. At the time the divisions between natural history, human history and religion were porous and the items collected were often more a reflection of the owner's interests than based on any sense of underlying organization.

One of the most famous of these collections was assembled by Danish physician and natural philosopher Olaus Wormius (1588-1655). Wormius studied natural phenomena at a time when medieval beliefs were giving way to those of the Scientific Revolution (1543-1687). He generally relied on empirical observation, noting that lemmings did not spontaneously arise from the air as was believed. However, even though he correctly stated that unicorn horns were actually from Narwhal he still believed that when ground into powder these horns could reverse poisoning.

The Museum Wormianum with Olaus Wormius in lower left

Wormius compiled engravings of the objects in his collection and speculations about their various meanings into a catalog titled the "Museum Wormianum", it was published after his death in 1655.

Still, Wonder Rooms and Cabinets of Curiosities were limited to those who could afford to assemble and maintain them. Frederick III of Denmark bought the Wormius collection and added it to his own. Before beginning his collection, King Christian I of Saxony was advised that three types of items indispensable in forming one were, "Art,… curious items from home or abroad… and… antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals."

(Read about An American Wonder Room in the next post on Museums)