The British Museum
The 18th century saw the flowering of the Enlightenment and the encyclopaedic spirit, as well as a growing taste for the exotic. These influences, encouraged by increasing world exploration, by trade centred on northwestern Europe, and by developing industrialization, are evident in the opening of two of Europe’s outstanding museums, the British Museum, in London, in 1759 and the Louvre Museum, in Paris, in 1793. The British Museum was formed as the result of the government’s acceptance of responsibility to preserve and maintain three collections “not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public.” These were housed at Montagu House, in Bloomsbury, specially purchased for this purpose. The collections had been made by Sir Robert Cotton, Robert Harley, 1st earl of Oxford, and Sir Hans Sloane. The Cotton and Harley collections were composed mainly of manuscripts; since 1998 these have been housed in a separate building, the British Library. The Sloane collection, however, included his specimens of natural history from Jamaica and classical, ethnographic, numismatic, and art material, as well as the cabinet of William Courten, comprising some 100,000 items in all. Although public access to the British Museum was free of charge from the outset, for many years admission was by application for one of the limited number of tickets issued daily. Despite this, François de la Rochefoucauld, visiting from France in 1784, observed with approval that the museum was expressly “for the instruction and gratification of the public.”
