As you walk along the tunnel from South Kensington tube to the Natural History Museum you are met by a barrage of posters. Among the adverts for pop concerts and trashy novels, a new witty example catches your eye these days: on a simple white background, three parts of objects are arranged like a game of Consequences to create a new image. A watercolour of a puffin, a nautilus shell, and the skeletal legs of a dodo, for example, form a new fantastical bird. This poster advertises the NHM’s new Treasures gallery, and sets the scene perfectly for the mix of slick design and stunning objects which you will find there.
Enter the museum by its grand main entrance, head up the staircase past Darwin in his chair, and you reach the Cadogan room which houses the new gallery. Straightaway you realise that one of the unnamed ‘treasures’ which the museum boasts is the wonderful Waterhouse building itself, as the room occupies a bridge, through the stained-glass windows of which you can look down on the cavernous and teeming halls below. It is a shame that the gallery does not make more of the beauties of the building, but it does include as one ‘treasure’ the wonderful Tree of Life created by artist Tania Kovats to commemorate the Darwin bicentenary, by covering the ceiling of the room with a single thin slice cut from a 200-year-old tree.
The room beneath has been beautifully converted, with shimmering, elegantly lit cases, one treasure in each, accompanied by a touch-screen label giving access to information. Each has a catchy headline, with a series of screens to swipe through, which marshal images and text to highlight different aspects of each treasure. Screens also suggest other areas of the museum that relate to and expand on each object, and suggest further online and mobile resources. This makes it clear that the 23 chosen objects are just the tip of a glorious iceberg that can be explored further in this diverse museum, a message which I have always felt the museum’s Darwin Centre, by contrast, fails to push home. The objects chosen illuminate the museum’s rich history as a collection, an institution and a building.
But why is this of interest to those of us who spend at least half of our time in the eighteenth century? The Natural History Museum is, after all, a characteristically nineteenth-century institution, as the portrait of its mastermind Richard Owen, which is among the treasures, attests. In fact, the treasures show how chronologically diverse the collections are, and how important are their origins in the age of Anne and the Georges. You could start with Sir Hans Sloane’s beautifully carved nautilus shell, which formed one of the founding objects of the museum when it still came under the British Museum umbrella. Given the intricately crafted nature of the shell, it might just as easily form part of the collections of the BM’s Prehistory and Europe Department, but it is used here to discuss the overlaps between art and nature which mesmerised Sloane. This one object perfectly encapsulates the message of Enlightenment curiosity and collecting which you find in the BM’s own Enlightenment galleries.
Sloane’s nautilus is also used to lead the visitor back to the story of early collecting which they can find in Sloane’s herbarium in the Darwin centre; a reference to the importance of eighteenth-century botany which is, likewise, shown by two other treasures. One is a herbarium page featuring a dried specimen from George Clifford’s garden in Holland, the collection with which Carl Linnaeus established his discipline-changing classification of the world of plants. Visitors will easily see how this connects to a second page from the herbarium of that incomparable Georgian adventurer and collector Sir Joseph Banks. This page is used to discuss Cook’s voyages of discovery and scientific endeavour, such as observing the 1768 transit of Venus. Both have the merit of hailing from vast collections which will allow the items on display to be rotated over time, minimising light exposure, and yet maintaining their narrative.
Two other treasures, similarly, highlight the early histories of geology and mineralogy in the eighteenth century. The meteorite discovered by a farm labourer at Wold Cottage in Yorkshire again references Banks in discussions of how he marshalled his scientific and social network to explain this rock’s (literally) groundbreaking origins. It then leads the viewer onwards to the museum’s spectacular Vault gallery in which the star minerals are displayed like items in a Bond Street jeweller’s. Beside the meteorite, an ammonite collected by early geologist William Smith, points to the profound questions that such fossils raised about biblical history for eighteenth-century scientists, and the enthusiasm for fossil collecting among the century’s virtuosi like Sloane and Banks. It, of course, then directs viewers to the famous dinosaurs. Both set the scene for Darwin’s evolutionary theories that are featured elsewhere in ‘treasures’ such as his pigeon breeds and an early edition of The Origin of Species .
Other treasures relate the passage of time and science through the eighteenth century more obliquely. A sad specimen of the extinct Great Auk looks askance at its neighbour, a composite Dodo skeleton – so extinct that even a complete example does not exist. Both tell the ongoing story of human exploitation of the natural world through exploration, trade and industry. Beside these sits the skull of a, likewise extinct, Barbary lion excavated from the moat of the Tower of London. This is used to discuss exotic nature as a cultural prize of kings and courts from at least the thirteenth century, as well as the abilities of the museum’s scientists to use such finds to diagnose historic ailments. As an item of cultural exchange the lion takes us neatly back to Sloane’s nautilus shell.
The beautifully-executed interpretation screens might, in fact, draw their connections even more widely. Would it not be wonderful if the discussions of Cook’s voyages pointed visitors to the related navigational instruments in the neighbouring Science Museum? Or if from Sloane’s shell they followed connections across the road to see other examples of minutely-crafted nature in the V&A’s British Galleries? It is a mark of how well each treasure is displayed and used here that such rich stories are drawn from a number of objects that might normally fill a single case. In eminently eighteenth-century style, a whole world is drawn from this perfect cabinet of curiosities.
‘Treasures’ is a new permanent exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London.
Image: Nautilus shell (Nautilus pompilius) from Sir Hans Sloane’s collection. Carved by Johannes Belkien, late 1600s. Copyright Natural History Museum.