Women and Museums 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge by Kate Hill

Author:Kate Hill [Hill, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Social History, Women, Social Science, Women's Studies, Travel, Museums; Tours; Points of Interest
ISBN: 9781526113412
Google: 1XC5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-07-01T04:12:29+00:00

Women as museum critics

Bailkin suggests that women critics in the mid-nineteenth century form a pre-history of feminist museologies.16 Both Anna Jameson and Lady Elizabeth Eastlake wrote extensively about art for the periodical press, as well as authoring books on art history. Both were also critical in their writing on existing public museums and galleries. Lady Eastlake, of course, was the wife of the first director of the National Gallery, so one would certainly not look to her for criticism of that institution. She was extremely loyal to and supportive of Sir Charles Eastlake and his stewardship of the gallery, although she tended to give the impression, especially after his death, that she had been at least an equal partner in many of his decisions. She was certainly critical of subsequent directors, particularly Sir Frederic William Burton, who was ‘totally unfit for it, & has introduced most inferior things’.17 Despite her reluctance to criticise the National Gallery, she had no scruples about other institutions; with her friend Harriet Grote she wrote a critique of the BM for the Quarterly Review. In many ways, this critique followed the widespread view that the museum was extremely overcrowded, and that the natural history collections should be separated out and established in a new museum, preferably on government-owned South Kensington land. Similarly, there is nothing particularly new about her assertion that the problems facing national museum collections stemmed mainly from the ignorant actions (or lack of actions) of Parliament, whom she accused of ‘ignorance, caprice, inconsistency and even niggardliness’; she consistently blamed Parliament, rather than the staff of the museum.18

Lady Eastlake did show, however, a consistent concern with making the collections accessible and comprehensible; she wanted to privilege arrangement, which helped the non-expert to understand the objects, over what she felt had been a tendency either to emphasise the monumental and prestigious aspects of the collection, or just to cram everything in without any regard for arrangement and order at all. Thus, of the coins, to all intents and purposes so hidden were they, she thought, that ‘they might as well … be in a private house’.19 In discussing the natural history displays, she accused the policy makers of seeing their popularity with the ordinary visitor as proof of the lack of intelligence of the ordinary visitor; natural history was not worth bothering about for the reason that the ‘lower classes’ were interested in it. On the contrary, Eastlake thought that museums were duty-bound to exhibit the most striking (and largest) specimens of natural history precisely because they could exert a powerful effect on anyone; even, as she put it in a characteristically forthright way, ‘the dormant brain of the veriest Hodge that ever stumped into the Museum on hobnails’.20 She was certainly not suggesting, then, that all museum visitors were equal, but she was suggesting that museum policy was impacting particularly negatively on the least experienced visitors. She praised the curators and staff at the museum, as well as the Trustees; but saved her ire for Parliament and its inaction over the museum, despite several select committees on the issue.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.