A Collection of Curios

Australian and pacific artefacts in London, 1780

Collecting Fever

By 1783, Sir Ashton Lever’s private museum in London’s Leicester Square contained some 28,000 items. Here the public could come face to face with the Pacific and Australia, including significant items donated by Captain Cook.

From the late 1770s, Lever employed natural history artist Sarah Stone (c.1760–1844) to draw his specimens. Her view of the interior of the museum demonstrates the size and range of the collections: shells, birds, an Asian elephant, a model of a North American birch bark kayak, and more. It also illustrates some of Lever’s many interpretative innovations, such as white display cases, to best exhibit his specimens.

The random but celebratory diversity of the Leverian Museum was very much of the spirit of the eighteenth century; by the nineteenth, museums were more disciplined, focused on order and explanation—not interested in displays of unrelated material—and arranged along the lines we know today.
Display item A Collection of Curios

 

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