British Museum

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. Visible in the Egyptian Room are a series of monumental stone sculptures, placed on low plinths, that run along either side of the central walkway. The pair of tall obelisks standing opposite one another were constructed in Cairo during the 30th Dynasty, in the time of Nectanebo II (360–342 BC). Behind these obelisks, also opposing one another, are two sarcophagi, one of which belonged to Nectanebo II (and was recovered from Alexandria), and the other, to Hapmen of the 26th Dynasty (664–525 BC). At the far end of the Egyptian Room, on the right side of the walkway, stands the monumental bust of Ramesses II of Thebes, constructed during the nineteenth Dynasty (1292–1189 BC). Through the archway, with its classical colonnade, is the famous Discobolus. 

With its eye-catching size and color, the bust of Ramesses II is perhaps the most significant piece in this image. As Stephanie Moser has observed, the discovery of sculptural depictions of historically significant figures helped establish Ancient Egypt as a more “recognizable” culture for a British audience. Prior to these discoveries, British archaeologists considered ancient Egyptian culture as somewhat otherworldly, or even monstrous, on account of a perceived emphasis on gods, death, and the afterlife. After the bust of Ramesses II was acquired in 1818, however, the “monumental masterpieces” of Ancient Egypt were regarded more favorably: the standard of beauty, once the preserve of classical antiquity, was modified to include some Egyptian artifacts, which, while previously regarded as “curiosities,” now found themselves valued as educational representations of the past (Moser 51; 114).  

Despite these shifting attitudes, the British Museum’s entire decorational scheme was inspired by the symmetry of Greek classicism, making any attempt to integrate the large, dark stone of Egyptian monuments quite difficult. The 1808 creation of the Townley Gallery, which was built to house the recently acquired Townley collection and included a sub-gallery for Egyptian sculpture, offered for the first time a space large enough for monumental fragments to be displayed without visual impediments. These objects no longer needed to compete with other objects or each other in “small, ill-suited rooms” (Moser 76), and could hold their own against the classical Greek relics displayed in the adjoining galleries. However, because the Discobolus is quite literally the focal point of this image, the comparison between ancient Egypt and ancient Greece is kept firmly in view—as is illustrated by the two spectators in Arab dress who, despite standing in the Egyptian Hall, direct their attention to the Discobolus in the adjacent room (see Moser 107).  

Johann Winckelmann was in part responsible for this mode of inter-cultural comparison between exhibits. His theories, which emphasized the relationship of history to the progression of cultural refinement, would inform museological display practices based on the same (false) equivalence. In this scheme, ancient Egyptian art represented the “primitive beginnings'' of human culture, leading to the “pinnacle” of artistic design demonstrated by the classical Greeks (Moser 49). By exhibiting Egyptian artifacts as a preamble, or a leading act, to the headline displays of classical Greek and Roman sculpture, the British Museum reinforced this comparative and hierarchical ideology.  

Viewers of this watercolor can see how curatorial techniques were used to compare, contrast, and evaluate different ancient civilizations. Its composition implies that although the Ramesses II bust is the highlight of the Egyptian room, the Discobolus (or classical Greek art in general) is still the highlight of the British Museum. The way the gallery is depicted in this image also points to the emergence of archeology as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century. The inclusion of such artifacts in a national collection asserted Britain’s place at the forefront of an international scramble (which included France, among other nations) to secure important archaeological finds, in an effort to materialize cultural and political capital. Elliot Colla argues that the Egyptian sculpture room was a “national space… funded publicly by act of Parliament, and expressly designed to promote patriotic sensibilities,” and that “these objects form an abstract image of the globe with London at its center.” The room thus serves a pedagogical purpose, “creating for metropolitan audiences a material inventory of the stuff of empire” (Colla 5). 

These monumental artifacts also contributed to “Egyptomania,” the early nineteenth-century passion for all things Egyptian that informed popular entertainment, architecture, and interior design—and was likewise important for literature, museology, art history, and the politics of archaeological collecting. They spoke to the power of things to endure, a theme encountered (in both celebratory and subversive ways) in the work of John Keats, Felicia Hemans, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley, among others. Indeed, it was the arrival of the bust of Ramesses II (then referred to as the Memnon Head) in London that inspired the famous sonnet writing competition between Shelley and his friend Horace Smith that produced “Ozymandias”—Shelley’s enduringly powerful sonnet in which the remaining fragments of a colossal statue lie impotently (and ironically) in faraway desert sands, where “nothing beside remains.”