Mr. Greene’s Museum

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. White elaborated in the issue of Gentleman's Magazine where the image first appeared in 1788, Greene’s Lichfield Museum “consists of two rooms, communicating with each other by an opening crowned by a large elliptical arch.” The collection was evidently not large, although the illustration deftly depicts the space in such a way that implies the presence of yet more content, just around the corner and out of view. As it is, a wide variety of objects—including (but not limited to) ethnographic artifacts, antique weaponry, natural history specimens, and a large clock—can still be seen in this composition, carefully arranged in cabinets. The collection was built over a period of decades, often by donation (its numerous benefactors included local luminaries such as Samuel Johnson and Erasmus Darwin, and other collector-naturalists such as Gilbert White and Ashton Lever). In its early years, it was the only museum of its kind, apart from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, that was open to the public.  

In his description of the image, White identifies the two artifacts hanging from the center of the arch (visible in the top-center of the image): the first, he writes, is “a buffalo’s horn, mounted, and neatly painted with arms and crest of the late Sir Thomas Aston, of Aston in Cheshire”; and the second is a “the tusk of an elephant... measuring near a yard and three-quarters in length; the ivory, by long continuance in the earth, was rendered soft and chalk.” The cabinet on the left side of the image is filled with what White describes as “a collection of South-sea rarities, brought over by Capt. Cook.” These “rarities” appear to consist of ethnographic artifacts, such as ceremonial clothing, weaponry, and other miscellaneous items made by the Indigenous peoples of the South Pacific islands. The cabinet on the far right contains “a collection of fire-arms, among which are match-lock, wheel-lock, and snaphance; Turkish, Spanish, Italian, and Old English muskets [with] Pistols, of almost all kinds, occupy[ing] the lower part of the case.”  

Through the archway, visible in the next room, is what White describes as “an uncommon musical alter-clock, whose outer case represents a Gothic church-tower, adorned with pinnacles, battlements, images &c. and crowned with an octagonal lantern of open work.” The contents of the cases on either side of this clock are harder to discern, but it is likely that they contain the assortment of “coins, crucifixes, watches and natural history, including geological specimens” that comprised the remainder of Greene’s collection (Hose 90). Atop these cases sits a combination of busts and large ceremonial vessels.  

Greene’s visitors, as well as viewers of this etching, are to some extent guided by the museum’s spatial discourse. The plurality of objects (minerals, fossils, shells, coins, gems, manuscripts, instruments, historical memorabilia, a wax cast of Shakespeare, and so on) may be taken in at a glance, but the cabinetry that houses them reflects their categorical organization, encouraging viewers to parse out artifacts into rational subsets. Yet Greene’s museum, by measure of its contents, scope, and appeal, also bears resemblance to a curiosity cabinet: in the absence of an underlying disciplinary or scientific principle, visitors are invited to make their own (potentially) idiosyncratic connections between exhibits. Cook’s print, like the space it depicts, exposes viewers to a substantial variety of objects whose scope and diversity provoke amazement and curiosity, but also precipitates questions concerning their inter-relationality—for example, how, to what extent, and why, do they belong together? 

The decision to segregate and group certain specimens together was animated by a desire to uncover and demonstrate the scientific principles that connected them. The way Greene visually organized objects would inform Erasmus Darwin’s approach to classifying the natural world, which in turn influenced the work that his grandson, Charles Darwin, would conduct in the field of evolutionary science. The etching, through its depiction of Greene’s organized display tactics—he carefully printed his own labels, along with a complete catalog—thus documents the beginning of the  historical shift whereby all objects (natural and manufactured) could be classified within an embedded hierarchy, a relational system through which things are compared and contrasted, or grouped and separated, according to appearance, structure, and shared history.  

Although not the first to depict the interior of Greene’s museum, this engraving was the first to document the extensive variety of the curiosities that formed the collection. An earlier image depicting the interior of the Lichfield Museum, A Draught of a curious Clock in the possession of Mr Richd Green of Litchfield, was published in The Universal Magazine in 1748 and featured only, as the image name suggests, the grand clock. By contrast, Cook’s etching offers a more comprehensive overview, depicting the two principal rooms, and a multitude of cabinets and shelves, along with their contents. After its publication in The Gentleman’s Magazine, English writer Stebbing Shaw reproduced the image in his multi-volume History and Antiquities of Staffordshire, which included, in its description of Lichfield, an account of Greene’s collection (Hose 89).