The world's oldest national public museum celebrates two and a half centuries of existence with an enlightening series of commemorative exhibitions and beautiful architectural innovations.

n my first visit to the British Museum in London nearly three decades ago, I was especially eager to see its famous collection of Egyptian mummies. From childhood I had been fascinated by the mysteries of ancient Egypt, and I imagined that the mummies would answer some of these mysteries for me--or at least emanate the magical glow of another dimension. When I arrived, there were certainly a lot of mummies: crammed into showcases and rather poorly lit, they were less exciting than I expected. Mummies are perhaps less interesting to look at than their decorated casings.

Terra-cotta portrait of Sir Hans Sloane, whose bequest led to the founding of the British Museum, by Michael Rysbrack, around 1737. ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

        However, in another gallery I did find something that fascinated me: dozens of manuscripts, including letters, literary drafts, and musical scores written by famous authors and composers. Written in ink on parchment and in notebooks, each piece of handwriting was highly individualistic, even idiosyncratic, and offered a direct glimpse into the personality behind the famed creations.
        This year the British Museum--the world's oldest national public museum--celebrates 250 years of existence, and every day thousands of visitors from around the world pour through its doors. They may be drawn by such celebrated objects of the ancient world as the Rosetta Stone (200 b.c.), which was used to "break the code" of Egyptian hieroglyphics; the Elgin Marbles, which graced the Parthenon in ancient Greece; or the Standard of Ur, which depicted the ideals of kingship, both at war and in peace, in ancient Mesopotamia. But most will also find, as I did, a trove of unexpected treasures.
        A child of the Enlightenment and the latter part of the Age of Discovery, the British Museum, according to its own literature, was founded to "promote universal understanding through the arts, natural history, and science." Many items in its vast collections relating to natural history and science have since been removed to form the core of other museums in London. What remains is still an immense collection of art and antiquities from cultures the world over, from times ancient to modern. This staggering array creates a context in which one can both explore a single culture in depth and examine affinities and contrasts between cultures.
        These days the venerable museum boasts a face-lift: To commemorate the new millennium and anticipating this anniversary year, major physical changes were carried out. Since the 1850s the museum had been housed in a huge building with four principal wings, which together framed a two-acre quadrangle. In the center of this courtyard was another building, not intended for general public use--the famous round Reading Room, part of the British Library, which itself was part of the museum. The Reading Room was open only to those who were granted a reader's ticket, and the courtyard was clogged with a disarray of outbuildings housing bookstacks, to which only librarians had access. The space, originally intended to be a public square, was utterly shut off from the public for 150 years.
        In 1998, the now independent British Library and its vast collections (including the manuscripts I saw on my first visit) were moved to a new building in the St. Pancras area of the city. This freed up the Reading Room, courtyard, and other gallery spaces for the museum.

The British Museum's glass-canopied Queen Elizabeth II Great Court opened in 2000.

        Architect Sir Norman Foster took on the job of making the courtyard area usable while keeping the historic round Reading Room intact--indeed, he enhanced its drumlike structure with a noble limestone exterior, covering the humble brick that was never intended to be seen, and restored its glorious interior. (Now open to the public, the Reading Room has become a reference library containing 25,000 volumes focusing on the world cultures represented in the museum, and a number of computers with access to COMPASS, the museum's multimedia database. It comes across, however, as rather a strange mausoleum to book culture.)
        The most compelling architectural work is the treatment Foster gave the courtyard. Beginning in 1999, the debris was laboriously removed and a basement floor excavated so that the entire area not occupied by the reading room could have educational and student dining facilities and new galleries beneath the courtyard proper. The courtyard itself, newly floored with handsome stone, was enclosed high above with a computer-designed, steel-and-glass lattice roof, bowed like a gracefully low-sloped barrel ceiling. Overall it creates a domelike structure, with the lattice arcing from the roofs of the surrounding buildings to the base of the roof of the round Reading Room, crowned by the latter's historic green copper dome with central skylight. From above, the new glass-and-steel structure looks rather like a doughnut with square sides and a round "hole" plugged by the Reading Room's dome. From below, it is breathtaking.
        The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court cost about £110 million to build and opened in 2000. It is the largest covered public square in Europe. The new atrium has information desks, museum shops, and caf‚s and displays some monumental sculptures. It makes access to all parts of the museum much easier than before. In the past, because the courtyard was closed to the public, the only way to reach a far gallery (and there are two and a half miles of them) was to traipse through room after room, threading through crowds until you got to your destination. Now, with a number of entrances to the glass-roofed courtyard, you can choose whether to "cut to the chase" or take the scenic route. Adding visual drama, two grand curving staircases facing the main entrance to the courtyard and the museum wrap around the exterior of the Reading Room, expanding to turn the room's drum-form into an egg. The stairs lead to a restaurant occupying a sunny upper concourse with a bridge to the upper level of the old north galleries. Below the restaurant, on the main floor, is a new gallery for temporary exhibitions.

Content and Context

his year the museum launched a series of anniversary-related exhibitions that take a fresh look at both content and context. "What characterises the British Museum at the beginning of the new millennium?" reads an introductory guide produced by the museum. "Most significant is the greater emphasis than hitherto on interpretation." Also, current scholarship "enables the Museum to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach well suited to its wide-ranging collections." These priorities were clearly reflected in the first two special exhibitions, The Museum of the Mind: Art and Memory in World Cultures, a look at the place of the museum in cultivating a lingering sense of individual and community identity through preserving human memory, and London, 1753, a cultural and sociological look at London in the era in which the British Museum was founded.
        And what an era it was! In the middle of the eighteenth century, with a population of 700,000, London was the largest and wealthiest city in the Western world. The mecca of finance and trade, it was home to the Bank of England and the East India Company.
        The British Museum was created by an act of Parliament in 1753, a move prompted by the death of Sir Hans Sloane, a physician whose lucrative practice funded a mania for collecting.

The newly restored Reading Room, once the select haunt of luminaries such as Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, and Karl Marx, is now home to a modern information center and open to all museum visitors.

        On the condition that £20,000 be granted to his two daughters, he left his voluminous collection to King George II for the British nation. The king signaled no interest, but Parliament intervened, founding the museum with Sloane's collection as its core. This included more than 71,000 objects, of which 50,000 were books, manuscripts, prints, and drawings. Also included were numerous coins, medals, natural history specimens, and 1,125 "things related to the customs of ancient times or antiquities." Count Frederick Kielansegge wrote of his visit to the museum in 1761: "It originated in a bequest of Sir Hans Sloane, by whom the first foundation was laid; he was a rich man, who passed his life in collecting, at great expense, everything that seemed in any way remarkable." Other collections were added soon after the museum's founding, including the Old Royal Library, which like our Library of Congress, possessed every book published in the country.
        It took until 1759 for galleries and a reading room to be opened to the public, in Montagu House in Bloomsbury, on the site of the current museum. As an eighteenth-century document titled "Regulations for Admission to a Sight of the British Museum" makes clear, admission was not universal: one had to apply in advance and be issued a ticket for a guided tour which could not exceed fifteen persons five times a day. Furthermore, visitors were required to be "decent and orderly in appearance," an effective way of excluding the poor and the unwashed.
        What would a gentleman see once he got in? Barthelmi Faujas Saint-Fond wrote in a 1799 travel book, "The museum is composed of manuscript and printed books; of Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, and Roman antiquities; Indian, Chinese, and Japanese idols; of the vestments, weapons, and utensils of the islanders of the South Seas and other savage nations; of quadrupeds, amphibious animals, birds, insects, fishes, shells, and other marine productions; of minerals, petrifactions, and fossils of every kind."
        Montagu House was eventually torn down to make way for a larger building. The British Museum we see today was mostly constructed between the 1820s and '50s, designed by two brothers, Robert and Sydney Smirke, in a Neo-Classical style. It was Sydney who designed the Round Reading Room.
        The museum's collection grew by leaps and bounds, sometimes through donations, and sometimes through purchase. Having its origins in the Age of Enlightenment, the British museum took in such treasures as the ethnographic and natural history materials accumulated by Captain Cook during his sea voyages to the far reaches of the world, as well as art and artifacts uncovered during various archaeological expeditions to Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and the Middle East. Some of the latter were financed by the museum. With the appointment in 1851 of Augustus Wollaston Franks as curator of the British collection, the museum further expanded its horizons and began to collect British, medieval European, and Asian material. (A wealthy man, Franks also left to the museum his collection of chinaware, netsuke, inro, bookplates, and jewelry.)
        With burgeoning growth came the necessity to focus and pare down. In 1824 paintings were transferred to the newly opened National Gallery, which later split off part of its holdings to the National Portrait Gallery. The natural history collections went to what eventually became the Natural History Museum in South Kensington in the 1880s; most recently, the British Library moved to its own building at Saint Pancras.

Theater of Memory

ccommodating and responding to memory is a central, but rarely articulated responsibility of contemporary cultural institutions" writes the British Museum's director, Neil MacGregor, in the catalogue introduction to the anniversary exhibition The Museum of the Mind. Using art and objects from various departments of the museum, the exhibition, which was on view through September 7, explored the core idea that man-made objects are often ways of recording information or commemorating events and personages, and that the museum is a kind of "theater of memory."
        On display were such items as portraits painted on wooden burial caskets from Roman Egypt, the wax death mask of Oliver Cromwell, commemorative portrait medals minted through the centuries, and a colorful section of Day of the Dead figurines from Mexico. During Day of the Dead, related to All Souls' Day in the Catholic calendar, Mexicans remember the departed by displaying these figurines and visiting the graves of relatives. The figurines are generally made of painted papier-m‰ch‚ and feature skeletons doing what living human beings do. One called La Catarina, for example, is a skeleton dressed up in a big flowery hat and dress, carrying a parasol. Sometimes a whole scene is depicted with multiple pieces, such as The Atomic Apocalypse, which shows a small population of skeletons threatened by a Grim Reaper about to toss a bomb down on them. Of course, this is the height of black humor, as why would the dead care about being killed?

The main entrance to the British Museum, part of a large Neo-Classical building designed by Sir Robert Smirke and completed in 1852.

        Tossing together objects from different cultures to make comparisons can be "a hazardous activity," MacGregor admits. Nevertheless that is what the exhibition did, with success, as the themes addressed were so broad as to be universal.
        The intent of the exhibition London, 1753 were far more direct: to convey what the city was like in the middle of the eighteenth century, in all its glory and ignominy, through a selection from the museum's extensive prints and drawings collection, augmented by objects. On the upbeat side, it was a prosperous era, a time of economic growth and a building boom. Grosvenor Square was the first residential development designed specifically around a private garden, and the idea caught on so quickly that today London is dotted with such arrangements. It was a time of expanding goods and services and of burgeoning popular entertainments such as theater, music, and public parks.
        In addition to native writers and artists, the British welcomed the German composer George Frideric Handel, who composed and presented some of his major operas and musical pieces in London, and the Italian artist Giovanni Antonio Canaletto, who mastered the painting of London's Thames River as he had mastered the painting of Venice's Grand Canal. In fact, the Canaletto drawings included in the show depict river scenes with Londoners standing on docks and boats with the graceful poses of his Venetians. Even the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart spent a year in London, from 1764 to 1765, and was portrayed in a 1777 watercolor by Louis Carmontelle. In it the eight-year-old Mozart sits proudly before his harpsichord, while his father plays the violin and his twelve-year-old sister sings.
        On the down side, this was also an era of abject poverty and egregious public and private vices. Prints by William Hogarth satirically capture some of the excesses of his times, from rich wastrels who couldn't be bothered to work to street scoundrels only too happy to cheat any passerby. His 1740s series Marriage ˆ la mode, featuring a Viscount Squanderfield and his wife, hinted at everything from boredom to infidelity. The wages of drunkenness were captured in his 1751 etching Gin Lane, wherein a distracted mother allows her baby to fall over a balustrade, a crowd in front of gin barrels begins to brawl, and, upstairs in the building, a man has hung himself.
        Prostitution was a fact of life, and illegitimate babies were surreptitiously dropped off at institutions. One of the most touching sections in this exhibition was a display of small objects left behind with foundlings at one orphanage, in order to identify a child should a parent someday show up to claim him. They included such items as lockets, decorated buttons, and small carvings.
        Additional events are planned for the 250th anniversary celebration. Among them is the exhibition Buried Treasure: Finding Our Past (through March 14, 2004). This is the first major exhibition of British archaeology in over twenty years and will feature some of the most important archaeological finds unearthed in Britain. Interestingly, the vast majority of objects in the show were uncovered by members of the public. Metal detectorists, says the exhibition literature, account for 90 percent of all such discoveries in the nation.
        Crowning the anniversary year is the new installation of two permanent displays. The Wellcome Trust Gallery forms the center of a series of galleries devoted to the ethnographic collections returning to the museum. It presents an anthropological understanding of the diverse ways in which peoples of the world ensure well-being, ward off misfortune, and diagnose and heal illnesses and troubles. The display's literature insightfully states: "For most peoples, health and illness have a social dimension as well as an individual one. To ensure well-being and prevent or overcome misfortune is not merely a matter of taking the right medicine but also how we relate to each other."
        Finally, the newly restored King's Library will house the permanent display Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the 18th Century. The oldest part of the present museum building, the King's Library formerly housed the library of George III (which has joined the rest of the British Library in St. Pancras) and is renowned as the finest and largest Neo-Classical interior in London. The new display of over five thousand objects focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, a time when learning was celebrated and knowledge eagerly sought and systematized. Great discoveries were made concerning ancient civilizations, the world's peoples, the natural sciences, and geography, and intense activity was devoted to the interpretation of these findings. Enlightenment examines how the British Museum, born in this atmosphere, contributed significantly to these processes and helped foster rigorous new disciplines. During this formative period of the museum, its collections were expanded, catalogued, and evaluated with ever greater discrimination. As recent developments and changes demonstrate, the work isn't over yet, for the quest after improved understanding of ourselves and the world we have made is surely unending.
        For more information on the British Museum, go to www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk. COMPASS, the museum's multimedia database, is accessible through this site.