Inside Out: Representing the Romantic Museum

This exhibition examines how museum spaces were conceptualized and visually represented in two-dimensional media forms, drawing examples principally from metropolitan London. Many of the museums of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century no longer exist. However, prints and paintings, often reproduced in gallery guides, periodicals, and ephemera, are valuable sources of information about the objects that they contained: from oddities and marvels to natural history specimens and revered artworks. Such images also document the arrangement of objects and the display strategies employed by collectors and museums, as well as the visual idioms—and aesthetic categories—they used to capture and ‘frame’ their interiors. The contents of collections, and the ways they were presented to the world, closely reflect predominant paradigms for the organization of knowledge, which were undergoing significant change in the Romantic period. The exhibition explores how public institutions and independent collectors, in both public and private exhibition spaces, represented natural history, human biology, emerging technologies, and archaeological discoveries, and how these displays were, in turn, represented by artists.

Date Published

March 2024

Exhibit Items

view of the Egyptian room in the British Museum

Unknown

This watercolor captures a view of the British Museum’s Egyptian Room, and a portion of the Townley Gallery beyond, as they appeared in 1820.

British Museum

William Chambers

William Chambers’s watercolor depicts the interior of Charles Townley’s dining room, in his home at 7 Park Street, as it appeared in 1794.

Charles Townley’s Sculpture Collection

Richard Du Bourg

This engraving depicts Richard Du Bourg’s collection of cork models, which at the time of this image’s creation (1808-9) was housed at 68 Grosvenor Street, London.

Du Bourg’s Museum of Cork Models

black and white etching of Mr Greene's museum

Thomas Cook, E. Stringer

Cook and Stringer’s etching depicts the upper rooms of the Bishops' Registry Office at 12 Sadlers Street, Lichfield, the historic building where the collection of Richard Greene (an apothecary) was held. As Rev.

Mr. Greene’s Museum

Visitors inspecting the interior of the National Gallery of Practical Science.

George Scharf

George Scharf’s 1832 watercolor depicts the interior of the main hall in the National Gallery of Practical Science, Adelaide Street, on the north side of the Lowther Arcade, West Strand, London.

National Gallery of Practical Science

Peale lifting a curtain to reveal his museum

Charles Willson Peale

In this self-portrait, artist and curator Charles Willson Peale depicts himself lifting a gold-fringed red curtain to reveal his museum, while inviting the viewer to come forward and enter.

Peale’s American Museum

Sarah Stone, Unknown

This watercolor, copied ca. 1835 from Sarah Stone’s original—made on site in 1786—depicts Sir Ashton Lever’s museum, or “Holophusicon.” Making effective use of one-point perspective, the drawing depicts the long series of rooms comprising the upper floor of the museum.