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"The Narrative of the Collection:" Visualizing the Ashmolean and the British Museum through Romantic Era Guidebooks

Curated by Joanna Beth Lackey (SUNY Westchester Community College)
Image of Ashmolean Museum

Through images culled from two Romantic-era guidebooks, this gallery examines two early public museums in England: the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford and the British Museum in London. Although both museums underwent major reorganizations and redistributions in the latter part of the nineteenth century, their foundational collections emerged from the diverse and curious tradition of Wunderkammern, or “wonder cabinets.” The gallery looks into the revised second edition of John and Andrew Van Rymsdyk’s Museum Britannicum, published in 1791, and Philip Bury Duncan’s A Catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum, published in 1836, as visualizations of what Susan Stewart calls “the narrative of the collection” (see On Longing; Durham: Duke UP, 2003; 156). The narrative of these museums that emerges from the visual culture of this transitional period—from private to public collections, expansiveness to order—is fraught with anxiety, fragmentation, questionable authenticity, and classificatory puzzles that seem to defy the boundaries of plant and animal, natural and artificial. These images show that the museum, too, could inspire a sense of wonder—and not just through the striking and idiosyncratic contents of its cabinets, but also through the novel experience of museum-going.

Date Published

Date Published
October 2023

Exhibit Items

Piece of Coral Shaped like a Hand

Unknown

It is difficult to discern a rationale for the Rymsdyks’ decision to associate these two drawings and thus, to discern these two objects from the collections of the British Museum.

A Coral Hand

Multiple Birds

Unknown

As Judith Pascoe argues in her 2006 book The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors, “[t]o be a collector of hummingbirds in the romantic period was to experience the most inspirational collecting conditions: a seemingly endless supply of

Aves, Birds

Detailed Illustration of Brick

Unknown

What is perhaps most remarkable about this illustration from the Rymsdyks’ Museum Britannicum is how unremarkable the most prominent drawing actually is: Figure 1, the square brick which dominates the upper half of the plate, is drawn with the same meticulous attention

Brick from the Tower of Babel

Various Diamond Shapes

Unknown

While the title of this plate, “Governor Pitt’s Brilliant Diamond, &c,” gives the impression of a series of objects of great value, it is worth noting that none of the drawings are of actual diamonds; they are based instead on “models” and “diagrams” of privately owned diamonds.

Governor Pitt's Brilliant Diamond, & c

Skull and Bone

Unknown

Among the vast collection of “Sloaniana” in the British Museum, 756 examples of “humana, as calculi, anatomical preparations, &c” were recorded in “An Account of the British Museum,” published in The New London Magazinein July 1788 (378).

Incrustated Scull and Sword

Inside of Ashmolean Museum

Orlando Jewitt
In collaboration with William Alfred Delamotte

The engraving depicts the lower room of the “Old Ashmolean” building at the University of Oxford. Various natural specimens, including a giraffe and a dodo, are evident, as well as two groups of large bones in the foreground.

Interior View of the Old Ashmolean

Spider Nest

Unknown

While a number of the Rymsdyks' illustrations in Museum Britannicum are visually sparse in terms of the number of specimens depicted and the scale by which they are rendered, this particular plate is replete with four figures that fill almost all of the available space.

Spider's Nest, with the Valve

Inside of Nest

Unknown

The two drawings that comprise this plate are roughly correlated in a more straightforward manner than the vast majority of Rymsdyk’s groupings.

Taylor Bird's Nest

Image of Ashmolean Museum

John Le Keux
In collaboration with Frederick Mackenzie

The engraving depicts the exterior of the “Old Ashmolean” building at the University of Oxford. We see it at a slight distance, with a good view of the street on which it is stationed. Three figures can be seen in the foreground. One is a scholar, dressed in cap and gown.

The Ashmolean Museum

Vase and Lamb

Unknown

Although the two drawings on this plate clearly unite objects from different categories of the British Museum’s collections—the vessel in Figure 1 is man-made, an artificial production, while the lamb in Figure 2 appears to be a product of nature—the so-called “Scythian lamb” further confuse

The Sallad Earthen Vessel, and the Scythian Lamb

Collection Credits

Collection Credits
Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI

Exhibit Tags

Exhibit Tags
museum

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