Part 3

Public interest in the treasures of art and science in London--whose extent was unknown to any one--first manifested itself in 1835, when Parliament caused an inquiry to be made into the state of the British Museum; a second committee inquired in 1847, a third in 1859. The result of these inquiries was a series of ponderous Blue-books, which few ever saw, but which that few studied very carefully. It finally burst upon the country that the British Museum and its collections had, up to 1860, cost three millions of pounds, and that it was “in hopeless confusion, valuable collections wholly hidden from the public, and great portions of others in danger of being destroyed by damp and neglect.” The commissioners of 1859 who made this report also pointed out the cause of the evils they recognized. The museum was in the hands of forty-seven trustees, each of whom seemed to think that there were plenty to manage the affair without his concerning himself individually in the matter. Never was costlier broth so near being spoiled by multiplicity of cooks, when Panizzi, by a sort of _coup d’état_, brought a strong executive control to bear upon it. It is a singular fact that even now the British government does not formally adopt the British Museum. The vote for supplies of its ways and means is given each year on a motion made by a member sitting on the opposition benches. During Mr. Gladstone’s administration it was made by the Right Hon. S. Walpole, a trustee of the museum; when Lord Beaconsfield was in power it was made by the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, also a trustee. The money is supplied grudgingly. There can hardly be found elsewhere men of such eminence in their own departments as Professor Newton, Reginald Stuart Poole, and Story-Maskelyne (the mineralogist); there can be found none who have done such enormous work in bringing order out of chaos in the British Museum; yet they receive salaries of six hundred and fifty pounds each for labors that deserve a thousand. The condition of this museum has much improved of late. The vast growth of its collections had crowded its literary and scientific employés into miserable unventilated cells, and their murmurings of years have until now been unheeded. When the first victim, the Talmudic scholar, Emanuel Deutsch, was dying, he said, “Perhaps when I am gone they will do something.” This was the hope of the thirty-eight scholars buried alive in the printed-book department. He died, and nothing was done. Then fell the second victim, Mr. Warren, head of the transcribing department. This caused a panic. The readers of the reading-room, many of whom suffer from the now medically recognized “Museum headache,” took the matter up. The trustees visited the room where the two scholars had perished, and condemned it. But several rooms only a little better were still used, and another able assistant, an eminent author, barely saved his life by resigning a post he had held in the museum for over twenty years. The principal librarian, Bond, and keeper of printed books, Bullen, have done much to improve the state of things: but there is still a great want of private rooms for the assistant librarians, who generally have to sit in draughty galleries, where no open fires are to be got at. That this huge building should have become absurdly inadequate for its contents and its original purpose indicates the vast progress of English science in recent years. The keepers of antiquities felt themselves bound to declare that there were valuable Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek monuments and inscriptions, in the crypts and corners of the museum, quite as useless for scientific purposes as if they had remained buried in the lands where they were exhumed. Much relief, both to the assistants and to the scholars who have had to dig like Schliemann for some of the museum’s treasures, will follow the removal of the vast zoological collections to South Kensington. The final result will be that the British Museum will be specialized, and become the treasury of the national archives and the national library.

As for the matter of payment, it certainly constitutes the gravest problem besetting institutions of this character. The best work done for literature, art, and science (so far as they are connected with the state) is done on small salaries, a thousand pounds being considered a vast sum for great men. Even such men as Tyndall and Lockyer get less than that by their official positions. But these gentlemen all feel the danger that might arise if such work became so well paid as to allure the incompetent, and its offices become objects of political intrigue. At present no country is better served in such matters than England, such men as those mentioned being content with small salaries because of the ample means of research afforded them. And indeed it would appear enough to prevent the offices for scientific and other work of an intellectual character being sought for gain, if some clever statesman would invent a way of paying the additional sums needed “in kind,” but in some kind, also, not transmutable into values for other than the learned. It must be admitted that thus far no English minister has appreciated the necessity that scholars should have salaries sufficiently large to raise them above anxiety, and to render unnecessary the too frequent frittering away of invaluable time and power in a multiplicity of extraneous and lucrative employments.

The redemption of the British Museum, so far as it has proceeded, as well as the establishment of nearly every institution of importance to art or science in the country, was largely due to the instruction by example represented in the South Kensington Museum. This institution, it is important to remember, did not grow out of any desire to heap curiosities together or to make any popular display; it grew out of a desire for industrial art culture, and the germ of it was the School of Design which opened in a room of Somerset House, June 1st, 1837. This poor little school is now a thing to make fun of. It took over a month for it to obtain the eight pupils with which it began. The first act of its regulators seems to have been a rule that “drawing the human figure shall _not_ be taught to the students.” Haydon insisted that there could be no training without the human figure. The government did not want artists, but men who could draw such patterns as should render it no longer necessary for English manufacturers to go to Lyons and Paris for such. Etty and Wilkie sat in the council beside silk-weavers and portly warehousemen. Fine-art students were actually excluded--this mainly because of the cry that the government would otherwise be taking bread out of the mouths of private teachers--and the School of Design in 1842 consisted of 178 pattern-drawers. Schools of a similar character were gradually established in some of the provincial manufacturing cities. And there had been about ten years of this sort of thing when the great Exhibition of 1851-52 took place.

Queen Victoria has described the May day when the Palace of Glass was opened in Hyde Park as the happiest of her life. She had witnessed one of those noble victories which leave no tears behind but such as may welcome glad tidings of good-will, and she had seen her hero wearing the only crown he coveted--that of success in a great achievement for European civilization. It is sad indeed that only as a widow does she live to realize the latest results of that day on her country.

The great Exhibition may be termed, so far as English art is concerned, the great revolution. Such a display of “florid and gorgeous tinsel,” to use Redgrave’s description, was never seen, unless in the realms of King Coffee. The articles from the Continent were glittering and showy enough, but those of Great Britain outglittered all, exciting the laughter of cultivated foreigners to such an extent that English gentlemen were scandalized and abashed without knowing precisely what was the matter. The Prince Consort, who was especially ashamed at the general disgust manifested for this tawdry English work, had brought with him from his careful training in Germany and at Brussels one excellent habit--that of deferring to the judgment of accomplished men in matters relating to their own specialties. When he found himself, as Chief Commissioner of the great Exhibition, the hero of a great aesthetic failure and of a great financial success--blushing for the fame of the country which had bestowed its highest honor upon him, and at the same time contemplating a net surplus of £170,000--the idea took possession of him that the least the money could do would be to begin the task of raising English work from the abyss of ugliness which had been so admirably disclosed; and that idea led him to consult artists of ability and men of taste, and to mediate between them and her Majesty’s complacent ministers, whom he managed to rouse into a happy state of bewilderment, which resulted in action.

The Prince Consort was, during his brief life, a fortunate man in many respects, but in nothing was he so fortunate as when, inspired by the best artistic minds in England, he induced the Queen to set apart some rooms at Marlborough House (now the residence of the Prince of Wales) for an industrial art collection and for art training, and when he persuaded her ministers to devote £5000 to the same purpose. He has thus made the great head-quarters of British art in some sense his monument. In 1852 the small collection of the School of Design in Somerset House was removed to Marlborough House, and the Board of Trade confided to Owen Jones, R. Redgrave, and Lyon Playfair the work of reorganizing the whole art training of the country. The collection transferred from Somerset House was trifling enough, but now there were added a number of articles that had been purchased from the Exhibition, and a still more remarkable collection, which has a curious history. After the French Revolution, when the infuriated people were prepared to destroy not only the _noblesse_, but the works associated with them, fine cabinets and beautiful china vanished out of Paris. At this time George IV.’s French cook gathered up a superb collection of old Sèvres china. This had long been distributed through the English palaces, and was even used for ordinary table service; it was now, by the Queen’s order, removed from the various palaces to Marlborough House, where it was at once recognized as the finest existing collection of a class of articles which was already exciting that competition among collectors which at present amounts to a mania. But the Queen’s best loan was her example. Ministers took up the matter with unwonted courage. Mr. Henley, of the Board of Trade, secured the Bandiuell pottery, Mr. Gladstone the Gherardini models, and the precedent was set which has since added the Bernal, Soulages, Soltikoff, Pourtalès, and other collections--one of the most curious being that of the Rev. Dr. Bock, a collection of mediaeval religious vestments. There is a myth still current that in one or two cases the secret agent of the British Museum had been bidding for some treasure against the secret agent of South Kensington; but it has no foundation. Once upon a time the British Museum and the Tower of London found themselves bidding against each other for a piece of old armor; but no similar accident could have occurred under the keen eye of Sir Henry Cole, who from first to last has been felt in the progress of this museum. Sir Henry developed a power of getting money for the museum, from the stingiest chancellors, unknown in the history of the English exchequer. He, with Mr. Richard Redgrave, explored Italy, and brought back many valuable treasures of early art.

In 1854 the first report of the newly-established Department of Science and Art was laid before Parliament. It was a Blue-book of 642 pages--so much being required for those interests of the country to which the Board of Trade had, in 1836, devoted the half of one page. This report and those which followed bore witness that a new enthusiasm had arisen in England for recovering its lost arts; but they increasingly proved also that the collections evoked from their hiding-places were already overflowing Marlborough House. In one sense this overflowing was of signal advantage, for it enabled the department to send a collection of four hundred beautiful specimens as a circulating museum through the provincial cities and towns--a plan which has been maintained by the museum, and also by the National Gallery of Fine Arts, with excellent results. The commissioners had not at that time, so far as their reports show, any notion of localizing the various schools of science and art at South Kensington. Indeed, no such expression as “South Kensington” had existed until 1856, when Earl Granville so christened the “Brompton Boilers,” which the government had empowered Mr. Cole to prepare for the transfer of the Marlborough House collection (voting £10,000 for the purpose), and which, with their three boiler-shaped tops, still stand as the seed-shell of the museum. It was little supposed then that the “Mr. Huxley” whom the report of 1856 speaks of as employed to collect specimens on the coast would ever be seated as he is now in a palatial science school at Kensington. There must, however, have been some very far-seeing eyes looking at things in those days, for the commissioners of the great Exhibition of 1851 persuaded the government to add to the Exhibition surplus of £170,000 enough to make £300,000, and to invest the sum in the vast Kensington Gore estate. This estate comprised between twenty-five and thirty acres of land, twelve of which belong to the museum, and has become the site of a great metropolis of science and art. The museum was opened on June 22d, 1857, by the Queen, accompanied by the Prince Consort and the Heir Apparent.

The removal of the collections of Marlborough House to South Kensington, and the establishment of the new movement in a centre of its own, with room to grow, was speedily followed by a grand event, namely, the donation by Mr. Sheepshanks of his superb collection of pictures to the nation. Mr. Sheepshanks supplies to gentlemen who wish to benefit the public about as good an example as they can find in modern annals. For many years he had welcomed artists to study and copy in the gallery opening from his dining-room, which so many of them now remember as an oasis in the wilderness which surrounded them in the last generation. But the owner of this gallery had observed that the Philistines of Parliament were still very strong: they had once refused to accept even a valuable collection of pictures (as already stated) from unwillingness to house them; and although they had got beyond that, and thankfully accepted the Vernon Gallery, he saw that the arrangements for giving shelter to this gallery were made very slowly. The National Gallery had a large portion of its Turner and its Vernon bequests housed at South Kensington, and a much larger portion of them hid away in its crypt, for twenty-five years, awaiting the hour when England should find out the magnificent works of which it is the heir, by seeing them on the new walls completed in 1876. Mr. Sheepshanks resolved to see his gallery--which was worth even then a hundred thousand pounds--attended to while he was yet alive. He offered his pictures to the country on the following conditions: that a suitable building should be erected at Kensington (which would remove them from the dust and smoke of the city); that they should never be sold; must be open to art students, and at times to the public; and that the public, especially the working-classes, should be permitted to view the same on Sunday afternoons. The government assented to all of these conditions except the last, and Mr. Sheepshanks was reluctantly compelled to add to that provision the words, “it being, however, understood that the exhibition of the collection on Sundays is not to be considered one of the conditions of my gift.”

Having thus summed up the history of the museum, it remains for me to consider its three aspects: (1) as to architecture and decoration; (2) its collections of objects; (3) its educational or art training method and character.

The accompanying map will show the series of buildings at South Kensington. There exists to the west of Exhibition Road a park of about ten acres, holding at the north the Royal Albert Hall, at the south the Museum of Natural History, and between these, on either side, the long line of arcade buildings containing the National Portrait Gallery, the Indian section, Naval Museum, Patent Office, the Museum of Scientific Apparatus, and, in addition, spacious halls for the display of machinery during exhibitions, for horticultural shows, and Mr. Frank Buckland’s methods of pisciculture. Such a collection of museums, answering the varied needs of science and art, cannot be found elsewhere--even within the limits of a nation. The gardens adjoining this series of buildings are beautifully adorned with statues and fountains, and will remain in the future, as they have been in the past, a favorite promenade, entered from Albert Hall and its extended galleries, in summer always bright with flowers, with music, and gay companies.

The building containing the courts was designed by the late Captain Fowke, of the Royal Engineers, and, I believe, there is no other building in this country more adapted to its purpose. The task assigned Captain Fowke was to build a picture-gallery eighty-seven feet long by fifty wide, with two floors, the upper to be lighted from above, and the lower open to the light from side to side, and to make the whole as near fire-proof as possible. The building is thirty-four feet above the ground-line to the eaves, and fifty to the ridge, and consists of seven equal bays, twelve feet in length and of the width of the building. The upper floor contains four separate rooms, two of forty-six by twenty feet, the others of thirty-five by twenty feet, lighted entirely from the roof, and giving a wall space of 4340 square feet available for hanging pictures. The lower floor is thrown into two unequal rooms of forty-six by forty-four feet and thirty-five by forty-four feet, each having a row of piers along the centre, the play of light from side to side being thus nearly unimpeded. Thus the upper floor has no windows, but as much wall space as possible, while the lower has no walls, but piers, as is demanded for the exhibition of objects in cases. The roof is double glazed, and the rule of lighting is that the height and width of the gallery should be the same, and the skylight half of the same. This renders it always easy for the spectator to avoid the glitter point on a picture, as may be seen by the accompanying diagram. The glitter point, altering with the position of the beholder, is at B, nine feet from the floor, when the beholder is at E_{2}, or five feet from the wall; and the glitter descends to C, seven feet from the floor, when the beholder advances to E_{3}. But if the spectator can recede to fifteen feet, the wall has no glitter up to thirteen feet. The skylight at South Kensington is brought as near as is consistent with avoiding glitter, and is twenty feet nine and a half inches from the floor. Just below the skylight run horizontal gas-pipes, with fish-tail burners projecting on two-inch brass elbows, and the light at night is as nearly as possible the same as in the day. When the gas was first put in this building there occurred an interesting controversy concerning the effect of gas on pictures, which elicited a valuable statement, jointly signed by Faraday, Hofmann, Tyndall, Redgrave, and Fowke, who had been appointed as a commission of inquiry, to the effect that coal-gas is innocuous as an illuminator of any pictures, if kept at a sufficient distance above them to avoid bringing into contact with the pictures the sulphuric acid caused by its combustion (22½ grains per 100 cubic feet of London gas).

In the large courts electric lamps are now used with much success. It is wonderful to note the beauty of porcelain and all objects of delicate decoration under the new light; it brings out the minute traceries better than daylight.

Security from fire here has been made as nearly absolute as possible, and Sir Philip Cunliffe Owen believes it impossible by any device to fire the museum; yet the water arrangements and vigilance at South Kensington are as complete as if the building were built of the ordinary materials. As a matter of fact, the choice of materials was made after long and patient scientific experiments. The main material is the best gray stock brick, with ornamental work of certain blue, red, and cream-colored bricks peculiar to some English counties. Some iron it was, of course, necessary to use for joists and girders, but in every case this iron has been isolated by being surrounded with a thick fire-proof concrete. The floor is of Minton tiles imbedded in Roman cement. The double roof is Mansard, and covered with a French tile (_tuile courtois_), selected at the Paris Exhibition of 1855.

The picture-gallery described above, made to hold the Sheepshanks collection, has had additions made behind it, in accordance with the original plan, of three large rooms, which contain various collections of pictures, and near the back entrance to these is the gallery of Raphael’s cartoons. All this series of picture-galleries constitutes an upper floor of a wing to two vast double show-rooms. One of these is a large square apartment, in which large numbers of marble and other antique monuments are displayed. The other, connected with it, is architecturally divided by slender pillars--between which, as an avenue, are show-cases, above and below--into two noble rooms with splendid arched ceilings. The first-named of these rooms (that which is without division, and single-roofed) has not yet received its wall decorations, which are to be a distemper half-way up, and above, a frieze of frescoes large as Raphael’s cartoons. The other show-room--with the double-arched ceiling--furnishes, as may be imagined, fine opportunities for wall decoration, as also for the ornamentation of floor and ceilings. The decoration here has not been completed, but it has gone far enough for the scheme to be judged by its effect.