British museum director talking collections

The Sunday Times
January 25, 2009

Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum in London.

Neil MacGregor
It was 250 years ago this month that the British Museum first opened
its doors to the public. When you visit the museum today, you visit
somewhere that is like no other collection, no other building on earth.
It is the only place where you can, in every sense, walk through the
world, and through time, and look at the whole range of what humans
have made and speculate as to what they have thought.

But the British Museum’s collection is a very odd one. There are great
works of art in it, of course, such as the Iris from the Parthenon or
Michelangelo’s only surviving study for Adam. But the British Museum is
not a museum of art. And its collection has always led to contradiction
with its name. It is a matter of bafflement to many people why it is
called the British Museum when such a small percentage of the objects
in it are British. But it is quintessentially British. It is
effectively the first public institution to be called British ‘ rather
to our irritation, the British Linen Bank got there first. It was
quintessentially British in 1753, when it was founded by parliament;
and it is true today.

It was set up in Montague House, on the site of the current building,
in a London that does a great deal, I think, to explain why it is the
way it is; a London that was the centre of world trade. As early as
1711, Addison wrote, `There is no place in the town which I love to
frequent as the Royal Exchange. It gives me a secret satisfaction, and
in some measure it gratifies my vanity, as an Englishman, to see so
rich an assembly of countrymen and foreigners consulting each other
upon the private business of mankind, making this metropolis an
emporium for the whole earth . . . Sometimes I am jostled by a body of
Armenians, sometimes I’m lost in a crowd of Jews, and sometimes I make
one in a group of Dutchmen. I am a Dane, a Swede, a Frenchman at
different times, or rather I fancy myself, like the old philosopher,
who upon being asked what countryman he was, replied that he was a
citizen of the world.’

It was the first time anybody could really have said that, the early
18th century, and it’s the first place it could have been said. It is
this London where Hans Sloane starts to build his collection. Sloane,
who was the friend of Newton and Handel and Voltaire, who looked after
Queen Anne as a doctor, who inoculated people against smallpox, was the
man whose collection is the basis of the British Museum. He was a very
clever doctor, an intellectual, and a rich one, because he is the man
who realised that cocoa, which is clearly good for you, but very
bitter, could be made drinkable if you mixed it with milk and sugar.
Drinking chocolate is the fortune on which the British Museum is
founded. And this enormous fortune, and this intellectual curiosity,
enabled him, using the maritime contacts of London, to put together a
collection of a sort that was unparalleled outside princely
collections, and in many senses unparalleled anywhere.

But it was a collection with a purpose. Sloane, like so many of his
generation, had been seared by the folk memory of the religious wars
that shook Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. His idea of looking
at humanity was to see in it what united people, and his collection is
geared to showing what are the common elements of human experience. And
so, for instance, he collects shoes from all over the world ‘ wooden
pattens from Malacca, Pyrenean espadrilles, leather shoes from Morocco,
silk ones from China. What he was interested in was that everybody uses
shoes, but every society addresses that need in a different way. And
it’s a good metaphor, I think, for how Sloane saw the whole nature of
different human cultures and, above all, religion. He thought one of
the purposes of his collection was the confutation of atheism, but what
he meant by that was that while all countries worshipped a god, they
all worshipped gods in different ways.

It’s this worldwide collection of objects for comparison that Sloane,
when he drew his will, offered for sale. He had two daughters, and he
wanted to provide for them. And he wanted £20,000. Above all, he wanted
his collection to stay together; and he offered it on condition that it
should be freely available to anybody who wanted to consult it. He
offered it first to George II.

It’s important to bear in mind that when Sloane makes his offer, this
is a country that has recently experienced what was in effect a civil
war, when the French-backed Catholic Stuarts got to Derby. There was
panic in London, and a real fear that the parliamentary system of
government could collapse. Anti-Catholic riots continued all through
the century; and there was also a profound suspicion, not just of the
French, but of the Scots. They were coming to London after the union in
unacceptable numbers, and by the end of the century Richard Newton
protested against these endless arrivals of pushy, ambitious Scots,
many of them in the government, if you please!

George II doesn’t want to pay the £20,000. Parliament is asked, and
parliament says, of course, it has no money. And so, like every British
parliament, they say they can’t possibly afford to do something for the
arts, but eventually they will have a lottery. So they did, bought the
collection and then had to decide what to do with it.

This is a very crucial moment, because it’s a moment when parliament is
consciously thinking: what kind of citizen does it want? There’s a
consciousness that the role of government is to think what sort of
society is desirable, and what kind of behaviour is to be fostered. And
parliament does something completely extra- ordinary and without
precedent. It decides it will give the collection to trustees, who will
hold it for the public benefit, without private gain. It’s the first
parliamentary trust, and it establishes something very remarkable. The
trustees are to be representative of the nation ‘ the Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, the Speaker of the House of the
Commons ‘ but also non-Anglicans. From the beginning there’s a
Dissenting trustee, Lord Willoughby, and a Jewish benefactor, Solomon
da Costa; and by 1766, a Catholic trustee. Even more remarkably, the
trustees are not susceptible to instruction by parliament. So
parliament creates a system where the museum will be funded by
government, but not controlled by it. And the beneficiaries of that
trust are `all studious and curious persons, both native and foreign’.
Information and knowledge are established as a civic good. The British
Museum becomes the private study collection of every citizen. And that
is still one of its great traditions.

From the start, the kind of person who came was striking. This was not
the elite world of Sloane’s friends. In 1784 it was reported to the
trustees that `those recently admitted consisted chiefly of mechanics
and persons of the lower classes’. And the museum continues to welcome
all visitors. Once it had opened totally without admission tickets, and
on days when people were not working, the numbers were enormous. On
Easter Monday, 1837, 23,000 visitors came in one day. Those are numbers
that would still strike us as astonishing.

The latest census shows that one in 20 of the population of central
London is recently arrived from sub-Saharan Africa. The questions our
collections raise, for example, about the long history of Africa, of
slavery, are not questions about another place, they are questions
about our city. We are back in the position where we have to address
the whole world, and in a new way.

We now have handling desks in many of the galleries. The notion that
this is still a private collection of every citizen is something we try
to recover. And we also make sure the collection can travel, not just
in the UK. The Discobolos statue was in Shanghai this year, for the
Olympic Games, where it was seen by 5,000 people a day; the same
numbers visited the Assyrian collection, in Shanghai too. There is no
collection in China where you can look at the achievements of Assyria,
Mesopotamia, the culture of Iraq or the achievements of ancient Greece.
If the trustees are to hold this collection for the benefit of all
curious and studious persons, native and foreign, touring is one of the
things that have to be done.

We also work with the BBC, whose programmes about us are seen by
millions; and of course we use the web, the main way of ensuring that
every citizen of the world can use the collection. We now have more
than 1m objects online, and large numbers of programmes to work with
schools, exploring particular cultures. The entirety of the old-masters
drawings collection is available online, at very high resolution, and
this means that for the first time, everybody can look at the great
masterpieces of European drawing in the British Museum’s collection.

Dürer’s famous drawing of a rhinoceros was one of the items in Sloane’s
collection that first went on show 250 years ago this month. It is, I
think, a good emblem of the museum ‘ and not just because some would
think museums are slow-moving, rather dimwitted and insensitive to
external stimulus, but because Dürer had never seen a rhinoceros. He
had read a report of this rhinoceros shipped from India to Portugal,
and on the basis of the best information available he created an idea
of a world he didn’t know. It’s exactly what the museum is for: to use
the information available, construct an image of what we don’t
experience ‘ and it will be wrong, but it is better than nothing.

Now, thanks to the web, you can study Dürer’s rhino in the most
extra-ordinary detail. We took the decision that the resolution of
these images should be of the highest, and should be freely
downloadable for noncommercial purposes. You can probably teach Dürer
better now in Sydney or in Tokyo than in the Print Room itself.

It is, I think, exactly what the museum’s first trustees would have
hoped for: the private collection of every citizen in the world.

Hear an audio recording of this lecture at