Sir Hans Sloane, an engraving from a portrait by T. Murray

London, England, AD 1728

The founder of the British Museum

Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) was the founder of The British Museum. This engraving from a portrait shows him at the age of sixty-eight. The inscription at the bottom reads: 'Sir Hans Sloane, baronet / Pres[ident]. of the Royal College of Surgeons of London and the Royal Society. etc.'

Sloane was born in Ireland in 1660, and trained as a doctor of medicine. At the age of twenty-seven he went to the West Indies as personal doctor to the Governor of Jamaica and while living there he began to form his great collection of natural history specimens. For the rest of his long life he collected plants, fossils and minerals, as well as objects from ancient Rome, Egypt and Assyria. He also amassed an impressive collection of 42,000 books, many of them very rare.

After he had returned from Jamaica to England, Sloane bought a house in Bloomsbury (the part of London in which the British Museum now stands), and quickly became well known as a scholar and as a doctor. He had many fashionable patients, among them Queen Anne.

When Sloane retired he moved to Chelsea (where Sloane Square and Sloane Street are named after him). He died in 1753, aged ninety-two. In his will he left all his collections to the British nation, provided that the Government would pay £20,000 to his two daughters. The Government raised the money by holding a national lottery, and in June 1753 The British Museum Act was passed through Parliament, setting up a national museum to house Sloane's collections and other collections of books and manuscripts. This was to be called the British Museum.