Governor Pitt's Brilliant Diamond, & c
Description:
The central image, figure 9, depicts one half of an Egyptian pebble, the interior of which seems to contain the image of a small, white face. This large, oblong pebble is encircled by other, much smaller figures, which are various renderings of stones. The first four figures illustrate the gradation of a diamond from rough stone to finished product: figure 1 depicts the uncut stone, figure 2 depicts the same stone after a first cutting, figure 3 depicts it after a second cutting, and figure 4 depicts the finished diamond. Figures 5 and 7 depict another diamond, the former an image of the product, and the latter a diagram of its many facets. Figures 6 and 8 are also diagrams of (different) diamonds.
Copyright:
Copyright 2009, Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
Location:
Accession Number:
Thordarson T 4136
Associated Places
The British MuseumAmong the Numbers whom Curiosity prompted to get a Sight of this Collection, I was of Course one; but the Time allowed to view it was so short, and the Rooms so numerous, that it was impossible, without some Kind of Directory, to form a proper Idea / of the Particulars. (Dodsley xiv)Eric Gidal notes that the British Museum was unique in this unprecedented degree of access granted to the public: "As an institution founded ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public,’ the British Museum marked a union of legitimization and freedom both aesthetic and social" (21). With free admission came crowds, and with those crowds came anxiety regarding who ought to see the collections as well as how they ought to be seen. Over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the museum continued to gain popularity. By 1805, 12,000 people visited annually. By 1817 that number grew to 40,000, and by 1833 over 210,00 people came each year to see the collections (Goldgar 229-30). As many reviewers noted, large and often raucous crowds were now an inescapable part of the museum-going experience:
[T]he bustling crowds which thrice-a-week are to be seen in the British Museum, swarming with aimless curiosity from room to room, loudly expressing their wonder and disapprobation of the very things most worthy of admiration, or passing with a vacant gaze those precious relics of antiquity, of which it is impossible that they can understand the value as they are, for the most part, insensible to the hallowing associations, which render these objects the links of connexion between distant ages and our own. (“A Visit to the British Museum” 42)The behavior of these crowds generated considerable anxiety in the press, with one 1839 reviewer even going so far as to publish three “cautions” for visitors to the British Museum and other public exhibitions: “Touch nothing,” “Don’t talk loud,” and “Be not obtrusive” (“Synopsis” 302-3).
Associated Texts
The long title of the Museum Britannicum, a guidebook to the British Museum, is as follows:Subject
“Table XXVIII, Governor Pitt’s Brilliant Diamond, &c" features a model of the uncut stone (Figure 1), and in Figures 2 and 3 drawings form casts in metal of the first and second cutting, while Figure 4 is a model of Pitt’s diamond. Figure 5 is a model of the Duke of Tuscany’s diamond, a diagram of which is shown in Figure 7. Figures 6 and 8 are diagrams of the diamonds respectively of the King of France and the Empress of Russia. Figure 9 is a separate original drawing, and is of a rough Egyptian pebble broken obliquely in half” (Thornton 73).Theme
Classification. Museum. Natural history.Significance
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. The drawings of the diamonds, then, are curiously situated somewhere between authenticity and inauthenticity—they may be accurate renderings of the objects on which they are based, but these objects are themselves representations rather than originals.Figured stones constituted a class of minerals whose sole unifying feature was striking form without apparent function . . . The coherence of the category did not depend upon a common explanation of their origins, but on the implicit analogy between the forms of nature and the forms of art . . . There was no lack of explanations for these stones, including celestial influences impressed upon subterranean vapors, ‘gorgonizing’ spirits that petrified animal and plant remains (as well as generating kidney stones in the human body), organic seed caught in rock fissures that nonetheless produced its usual form in the unusual medium, the vegetation of crystals like plants in stony matrices, plastic virtues shaping stones in accordance with divine archetypes, miraculous interventions, or simply chance. (286-7)Rymsdyk’s juxtaposition, in this plate, of the authentic and the inauthentic, the rare and the common, the natural and the artificial, again suggests the kinship of his project with that of early modern curiosity collectors rather than with a more systematic form of classification.
Bibliography
“An Account of the British Museum” New London Magazine 4.40 (1788): 377-78. Print.Delineator:
Image Date:
1791