DIVISION XV
MUSEUMS AND ART GALLERIES
CHAPTER XXXVI
MUSEUMS AND ART GALLERIES
552.
552. There are museums of all kinds in existence, some of them of world-wide importance, and they may be roughly classified into the following groups:
General Museums.—These are collections of a miscellaneous kind, comprising art, science, archæological and other objects, and aiming more or less at universality. The British Museum was at one time a universal collection, but since it was divided into art, ethnological, natural history and industrial departments, it no longer forms a general collection under one roof. Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, is a general museum, and there are many others in the provinces.
National Museums.—Collections illustrative of the arts, manufactures, antiquities, literature and history of a nation. These range in extent from the great German, Hungarian and French museums, down to museums of national antiquities, like those of the Societies of Antiquaries of England, Scotland and Ireland.
Science Museums.—Comprising Anatomical, Botanical, Geological, Chemical, Physical, General Natural History, Astronomical, Ethnological and other varieties. Typical examples are the Hunterian Museum of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons, London; the Herbarium at Kew; the Museum of Practical Geology; the Pharmaceutical Society; the Natural History Museum at South Kensington; the United Service Museum (Naval and Military) at Whitehall; and the historical collections of the British Museum which include Ethnology.
Local Museums.—These are to be found in all parts of the country, and they usually serve to illustrate and preserve the natural history and antiquities of a particular district; and they differ from national museums, in being restricted to a particular locality.
Special Museums.—Of these there is practically no end. They have been formed to illustrate certain restricted departments of science, art or history, such as Hygiene, Numismatics, Watch-making, Heraldry, Costume, etc., and they resemble exhibitions of a special kind, save that they are permanent.
553.
553. Generally speaking, a museum is a collection of the objects which go towards the formation of a subject, just as a library is a collection of the literature connected with a subject or subjects. The museum is necessary to the material conception of a subject, just as literature is essential as the permanent record of the subject. For example, in tracing the evolution of the printed book from its manuscript forms, one can form an idea of the appearance of such books by reading up the relative literature, and examining a few facsimiles, and so on; but, in order to realize in a perfect way the aspect, atmosphere and details of early writing and printing, one must go to the great exhibitions or museums of such books at the British Museum or John Rylands Library, Manchester. It is the same with machinery. While a diagram of a machine as it appears in a book may be comprehensible to a few specially educated minds, it would be a mere puzzle to an ordinary human being unless he could go to a museum like that at South Kensington and see a working model of the machine in operation. He could then realize in a practical and concrete way the merely graphic or theoretical view afforded by the book.
554.
554. All the great State museums in the country have been established under the provisions of special Acts of Parliament. Some of these, like the various acts establishing the British Museum, date from the eighteenth century, while others are much more recent. It is not proposed to deal with the legislation and history of the State museums, nor is it necessary to do more than describe, later on, their relations with the municipal museums which may now be considered.
555.
555. In 1845 was passed the first Museums Act (8 & 9 Vict., c. 43) “for encouraging the establishment of museums in large towns,” under which the local authorities of towns over 10,000 of population were permitted to erect museums and levy a halfpenny rate. No specimens could be bought, but an entrance fee of 1d. could be charged. This Act was practically inoperative, as only Canterbury, Warrington, Leicester, Dover, Salford and a few other places adopted it, and in 1850 it was incorporated in the first Public Libraries Act, 1850 (13 & 14 Vict., c. 65), which repealed it and added the permissive clauses which existed till 1893. This Act in its turn was repealed by that of 1855, and again this was repealed by the Public Library Act of 1892 and subsequent amendments, which remain the leading Acts under which libraries may be established, with such subsidiary departments as museums and art galleries. A digest of the powers conferred on local authorities by those various Acts appears in Section 4 of this Manual. The authorities seem to have become aware of the difficulty of supporting so many institutions out of one restricted rate, because in 1891 was passed “An Act to enable Urban Authorities to provide and maintain Museums and Gymnasiums.” Under this Act, which did not apply to Scotland or the County of London, but only to England and Ireland, local authorities were enabled to levy a special rate of 1⁄2d. per pound for museum purposes, and a rate of 1⁄2d. per pound for gymnasium purposes, and to make regulations for the purposes of both kinds of institutions. In 1901 this Act was extended to the County of London by the “Public Libraries Act, 1901.” A resolution of the local authority is sufficient for the purpose of adopting this Act, and the regulations for adoption are similar to those prescribed for the Public Libraries Acts. The principal clauses of the Act are as follows:
Clause 4.—“An urban authority may provide and maintain museums for the reception of local antiquities or other objects of interest, and gymnasiums with all the apparatus ordinarily used therewith, and may erect any buildings, and generally do all things necessary for the provision and maintenance of such museums and gymnasiums.”
Clause 5.—“A museum provided under this Act shall be open to the public not less than three days in every week free of charge, but subject thereto an urban authority may admit any person or class of persons thereto as they think fit, and may charge fees for such admission, or may grant the use of the same or of any room therein, either gratuitously or for payment, to any person for any lecture or exhibition or for any purpose of education or instruction. . . .”
Full power is given by other clauses to make all necessary regulations as to hours, staff, order, etc., in both museums and gymnasiums, and for borrowing money for buildings or other purposes.
Separate accounts are to be kept, and “The amount expended by an urban authority under this Act shall not in any year exceed the amount produced by a rate of a halfpenny in the pound for a museum, and the like amount for a gymnasium established under this Act.”
556.
556. A new provision in legislation of this kind is contained in Clause 12, which empowers an urban authority to sell a museum or gymnasium after seven years’ trial, if it is deemed unnecessary or too expensive, but only with the consent of the Local Government Board. Any moneys received from such sale are to be applied, in the first instance, to the repayment of loans, and if not all required for such a purpose, may, with the approval of the Local Government Board, “be applied to any purpose to which capital moneys are properly applicable.”
557.
557. It is further provided (Clause 13) that the powers given to urban authorities under the Act “shall be deemed to be in addition to and not in derogation of any other powers conferred by Act of Parliament, law, or custom, and such other powers may be exercised in the same manner as if this Act had not been passed.” In other words, the powers conferred by the “Public Libraries Acts,” for example, with regard to museums, still hold good, and the new powers created by the “Museums and Gymnasiums Act” can be exercised as an addition to them. It should be noted that, in addition to the general legislation contained in the Public Libraries and Museums Acts, many private or local Acts have been passed, under which different localities have obtained power to spend money on the provision of museums and art galleries, greatly in excess of the limits imposed by the general Acts.
558.
558. This represents practically the whole of the legislation connected with municipal museums, and it may be inferred, from the financial provision allowed by Parliament, that no museum which depends entirely upon the halfpenny rate can be in a very flourishing condition. The deficiencies of the rate-income are in many cases made up by the donations and bequests of private donors; occasionally public bodies render valuable aid; not infrequently the closely restricted library rate is nibbled at and diverted from its real purpose; and very often the State, represented by the Victoria and Albert Museums at South Kensington, circulates useful and valuable loan collections. In these various ways museums are helped, and within the past few years, or since the Museums Association was established in 1890, the organization, scientific value and equipment of museums have improved in a very marked degree. No doubt in some localities can still be seen the old-fashioned hotch-potch collection of miscellaneous lumber styled a museum, wherein a stuffed walrus jostles a suit of armour, and local fossils and meteorites are beautifully mixed up with birds’ eggs, flint implements and coins. Such collections only require an alligator, and a canoe from Fiji on the walls, to be perfect specimens of the Wardour Street kind of museum. Happily this kind of omnium-gatherum museum is rapidly dying out before the advance of rational classification, and in some cases where collections are small and contained in one room, yet by means of intelligent arrangement incongruous objects are kept apart, and the little museum is made an instructive nucleus, instead of a high-class marine-store.
559.
559. This leads to such questions as the elements of museum classification and description, which are the most important points in the relations between libraries and schools and museums. Without classification a general or even special museum is comparatively useless. Without effective arrangement and descriptive labelling the specimens remain uninstructive and misleading. On these two points museums resemble libraries, and it is only when they agree in the essentials of classification and description that the institutions become mutually beneficial. A well-classified and arranged cabinet of minerals, with a full set of descriptive labels, is simply invaluable to the student of mineralogy and geology. When, therefore, a student is referred from the literature to the objects described in the text-books, he is educated to the extent of being able to appreciate the fact that objects are grouped together in respect of certain resemblances, and that classification into related groups is the basis of the science he is studying. On going to a museum of specimens, such a student, if he were an entomologist, would naturally expect to find together all the butterflies, bees, beetles, flies and other objects properly classified according to order, genera and species. If he found all the moths, bugs, flies and beetles mingled in one huge jumble, and labelled Insects, the collection would be uninstructive and would throw no light on his previous reading.
560.
560. Whatever set of concrete objects a student sets out to examine in a museum, after being referred from his books, he expects to find some relationship between the literature he has studied and the objects he means to compare and examine. On this principle all the large museums of the world are arranged, and the result is that no student who has previously acquired an elementary knowledge of an art or science from text-books should experience any difficulty in finding his way about a museum. It is true that, for purposes of popular display and to tickle up juvenile interest in natural history, some museums exhibit fine specimens of birds or mammals out of their order, where they will attract notice, but the bulk of the collection will be found in strictly classified order. In many important museums it has been found useful to illustrate animal structure and comparative anatomy by means of key or type collections, which are kept apart from the genera classification, yet serve to illustrate important points in comparative zoology, which it would be difficult to do on a very extensive scale. There are many text-books written exactly on the same principle. One author takes a rabbit, another a crayfish, and from these bases teach the main facts of animal structure which apply all round. So in a museum. While it would be absolutely impossible to repeat at every centre such a fine collection of minerals as has been gathered together at the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, yet it is possible to illustrate the main facts and classification of mineralogy by means of a selection of actual specimens or models. Similarly at the British Museum, the student of early printing does not find himself confronted with a complete chronological sequence of all the books printed in the fifteenth century to illustrate the incunabula, but he finds a selection, or type collection, which in the most effectual way traces the development and evolution of the printed book. The more these type collections are adopted and utilized, the greater will become the value of museums for elementary science teaching, and as most museums are unable to collect and display specimens of everything in the world, it is obvious that they must do as libraries have to do—select only what is best, most typical and instructive, and leave indiscriminate collecting to the great universal museums supported by the State.
561.
561. A well-arranged and classified museum, whether of a general character, or which is confined to local botany, zoology, geology and archæology, has great bearing on the educational work of public libraries. It enables a reader to realize the material side of his studies, and by showing him related objects in a definite order, broadens his outlook on the subject, and brings home to him the reality of the matter. As object-lessons are to school-children, so are museums to library readers.
562.
562. Art galleries are divisible into three classes—1. Those maintained or assisted by the State=the National Gallery; Scottish National Art Gallery, etc. 2. Those endowed by private munificence or by public bodies=the Wallace Collection; Tate Gallery; the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the Harris Art Gallery, Preston, etc. 3. Those maintained from local rates levied under special Acts of Parliament; or, under the Public Libraries Acts, which empower local authorities to support art galleries out of the penny rate. There is no special Act for the establishment of art galleries similar to the Museums Act already described, and apart from special Acts, the Public Libraries Acts are the only ones which empower the establishment of art galleries. Needless to say, such powers are rarely exercised unless other sources of endowment or income are forthcoming. So many single pictures cost more than the produce of a penny rate in most towns, that it is, on the face of it, absurd to think of art galleries only as departments of public libraries. In some cases part of the library rate is no doubt used to defray part of the expenses of art galleries, particularly buildings, but it is very unusual to purchase pictures from such a meagre fund. Art galleries are greatly assisted by loan exhibitions contributed to by artists, picture owners, both public and private, and the national art authorities acting through the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington. Annually the South Kensington authorities lend to over 400 museums, exhibitions, schools of art and science, etc., no fewer than 47,000 objects, of which 46,000 are works of art, including pictures, embroideries, photographs, metal-work, pottery, etc. But for these circulating collections, comparatively few of the smaller art galleries of the country could keep alive interest simply by means of their own permanent collections. It is only in large towns, like London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, etc., where great and representative collections are kept illustrating the leading schools of art, that any direct educational value can be said to attach to art galleries. So far as educational value is concerned, an art gallery cannot for a moment be compared to a museum or a library. Its appeal on the educational side is to a very small section of the public, and even to this section such appeal is limited by the size and character of the collection. The student of early Italian or Flemish painting can learn nothing in a little provincial art gallery, containing fifty or sixty modern landscapes and figure subjects; and the student of Impressionist painting will not find much to help him in a gallery composed of examples of old Dutch and French masters. The value of an art gallery depends, therefore, on its size and representative nature so far as art students are concerned, and on the appeal which fine paintings make to the higher feelings and perceptions of mankind for its influence as a creator of taste and stimulator of a love of the beautiful. When an art collection takes the form of a special exhibition illustrative of a subject, rather than a particular school of painting, its value and interest are enormously increased. Suppose, for example, that an art gallery is devoted to an exhibition illustrative of some great historical subject, like the career of Napoleon I. The value of the pictorial side of the subject at once stands forth with great prominence, and one can realize the educational value of art in the exposition of history. But in a mere random collection of pictures, on all kinds of subjects, by all kinds of painters, there is no kind of consecutive teaching or definite connexion with the art literature contained in a library, and, therefore, such a miscellaneous selection of pictures is chiefly valuable as a kind of vague appeal to the æsthetic feelings of the casual observer. Only great collections like those of the National Gallery in London, and the Louvre at Paris, can be said to illustrate the literature of art, and it is chiefly in regard to such art galleries that some direct connexion can be traced between art collections and libraries.
Bibliography
563. Museums and Art Galleries
563. Museums and Art Galleries:
Chambers and Fovargue. Law relating to . . . Museums.
Flower, Sir W. H. Essays on Museums, 1898.
Greenwood, T. Museums and Art Galleries, 1888.
Jackson, M. T. The Museum: A Manual of the Housing and Care of Art Collections, 1917.
Murray, David. Museums: Their History and Use, 1904, 3 vols. [Vols. 2-3 are a most extensive bibliography.]
Museums Journal.
For articles see Cannons: F 17-18, Museums; F 19, Art Galleries.