Collection history
When its doors first opened in 1753 the Museum was not, as now,
conceived as a collection of art and antiquity. Rather it was a
great assemblage of books, manuscripts and specimens of natural
history.
The founding collection of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) certainly
contained Classical and other antiquities but, with few exceptions,
these had been purchased simply to make up his cabinet of
curiosities of 'natural and artificial rarities'. Apart from coins
and engraved sealstones, there were few objects among them of great
distinction.
The Sloane antiquities, however, acted as a magnet and drew
others to them. In 1757, for example, Thomas Hollis presented a
number of small Classical busts and inscriptions, followed by other
gifts. An outstanding early acquisition was a fine bronze head,
probably of the playwright Sophokles, donated in 1760. It had been
part of the important collection of Classical antiquities formed by
Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (1585-1646), which was one of the
first of its kind in England. In 1772 the lawyer and antiquary
Matthew Duane, together with Thomas Tyrwhitt, presented sculpture
that had been bought in London, which came originally from Asia
Minor. There the English community of the trading post at Smyrna
(modern Izmir) were responsible for some of the first Greek
antiquities to come to England. These often changed hands several
times before they entered the Museum's collections.
This development of the collection received impetus through the
vision of Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), who for more than
thirty years served HM King George III as British ambassador to
Naples. There he amassed a vast collection of Greek vases, bronzes,
sealstones, coins and numerous other Classical antiquities of high
quality, which were offered to the British Museum for purchase in
1772. Sir William himself augmented this purchase with numerous
gifts, and other collectors followed suit. In 1799, for example,
Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode gave his important collection of coins
and sealstones.
The Portland Vase, the most famous cameo-glass vessel from
antiquity, had been in Hamilton's collection before it was bought
by Margaret, dowager Duchess of Portland. It was deposited in the
museum by the fourth Duke of Portland in 1810, and finally
purchased from the seventh Duke in 1945.
The Museum is famous now for its great collection of Classical
sculpture. It made its first major acquisition, largely of Roman
sculpture, when in 1805 it purchased the collection of the great
eighteenth-century antiquary Charles Townley. In 1814 came the
marble frieze of the fifth-century BC temple of Apollo Kourios at
Bassae in western Greece, and in 1816 there followed the
extraordinary collection of the 7th Earl of Elgin; a collection
that included sculptures from the Parthenon.
In less than twenty years the Museum's holdings of ancient
objects had been transformed by these acquisitions, and a new
understanding of Greek sculpture made possible.
A new Department of Antiquities and Coins had been formed in
1807, with Taylor Combe as the first keeper. A new gallery, built
for the Egyptian and Townley sculptures and Hamilton's vases, was
completed in 1808, but proved inadequate for housing the
ever-growing collections and was pulled down in the 1840s to make
way for the western wing of the present building. The Department of
Antiquities also grew until in 1860 it split several ways and the
present Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities was formed.
The first keeper was Charles (later Sir Charles) Newton
(1816-1894), a distinguished and far-sighted scholar who was
committed to the acquisition and display not only of major
monuments and works of art, but also of smaller-scale objects
illustrative of daily life in the Classical world.