Oxford University Museum of Natural History is home to an internationally
significant natural history collection, including the first dinosaur fossils to
be scientifically described and the only surviving soft tissue from
a dodo anywhere in the world. But it's also one of the most remarkable
buildings of the Gothic revival; a treasure house of Victorian sculpture
and design. My name is John Holmes. I'm professor of
Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham,
and an Honorary Associate of the museum. Over this series of podcasts I want to
introduce you to the art and architecture
of Oxford University Museum of Natural History and to give you a virtual tour
of this extraordinary and beautiful building. In the last
episode I described how the museum came to be built
through a unique collaboration between scientists, architects and Pre-Raphaelite
artists. In this second episode I want to begin
to show you the museum itself, looking at how the sculpture on its
facade encapsulated the messages Oxford University wanted to teach its Victorian
students about natural history and natural
theology. The overall design for Oxford University
Museum was drawn up by the Irish architect Benjamin Woodward,
but many other people were involved in creating the details of its decorative
schema. It was the Diocesan architect for Oxford,
George Edmond Street, who first proposed that the museum
should be built in a Gothic style for two main reasons. Firstly, Gothic
architecture had always been decorated with carvings of plants and animals,
so this was a fitting style for a museum which wanted to teach natural history
not just through its collections but through art.
Secondly, while classical architecture went back to pagan Greece and Rome,
Gothic had always been a Christian style associated with cathedrals,
churches and abbeys. Both these principles of Gothic architecture can be
seen at work in the decorative sculpture on the museum's façade.
According to Henry Acland, the Regis Professor of Medicine at Oxford who led
the campaign to build the museum, the carvings on the windows across the
façade were supposed "to illustrate some part of the fauna and
flora of our planet". The first floor windows on the south
side of the tower were supposedly going to be carved to represent different
orders of mammals, starting with humans then other primates
then carnivores, while those on the north side are carved
mainly with birds. But whatever the university and its
scientists had in mind, they had to contend with something they had hoped
for but not necessarily bargained for: they
were working with artists of genius. The carvings around the windows of the
museum are largely the work of two men. John Ruskin was Victorian England's most
famous art critic, the friend and patron of the
pre-Raphaelites, and an influential teacher and social reformer.
An old college friend of Acland, he'd been involved in the design of the
museum from the outset. In 1855, Ruskin drew a portfolio of
designs for windows, going on to pledge £300 of his own
money – a very substantial sum at the time and one of the largest single donations
to the museum – to pay for them to be carved.
James O'Shea was a working class Irish stonemason
whose exact origins remain obscure to this
day. Along with his brother John and his nephew Edward Whelan,
he came over with Woodward from Dublin where they'd been working together on a
new museum building for Trinity College. It was fundamental to Ruskin's Gothic
credo that, as he explained in the letter to Acland,
"all architectural ornamentation should be executed by the men who design it."
This was exactly how O'Shea preferred to work.
So it is ironic that when his carving upset the University, it was Ruskin's
designs that he ended up executing instead.
The story goes something like this: Towards the end of 1859
O'Shea was carving an upper window with figures of monkeys.
The master of University College, Frederick Plumptre,
accused him of damaging University property, so O'Shea cheekily re-carved the
monkeys into cats, scotching Acland's scientific schema.
Acland told this story as a joke some 35 years later to explain why the
carvings around the so-called Cat Window look more like medieval grotesques
than natural history illustrations, so it may not even be true.
But it does seem that the University authorities were unhappy with O'Shea's
style of carving as for his next task they required him
to repress the seemingly irrepressible and to carve the window immediately
below the cat window to a design drawn by Ruskin four years
before. Where the Cat Window is charmingly
exuberant and playful, the Ruskin Window, as it's known,
is elegant and meticulous in its truth to nature.
Ruskin's design centres on two strawberry plants growing across one
another from the tops of the window's two central columns.
O'Shea's carving follows Ruskin's finished drawing to the letter.
After this, their collaboration became more equal
and more in line with Ruskin's own principles. O'Shea moved back up to the
first floor and began to carve the window to the
left of the central tower. The theme of this window is birds and
O'Shea's carving incorporates several features sketched out by Ruskin in his
early designs. These include the columns of birds up
the sides of the window, the bands of oak leaves growing around
the main arch, and the two birds who face each other just below it.
The bird at the centre of the tracery has stepped straight out of one of
Ruskin's most appealing designs, raising its head to fit the shape of its
new home. If the Cat Window shows O'Shea at his most creative,
and the Ruskin Window shows Ruskin's care and refinement as a designer,
this third window combines the vitality of O'Shea's sculpture
with Ruskin's eye for architectural detail, beginning a series of beautiful
celebrations of bird life across this wing of the building. If the
carvings round the windows of Oxford University Museum of Natural History
celebrate the natural world, those around its main entrance tell you
how Oxford's Victorian scientists wanted its visitors to interpret it.
In Oxford in the 1850s, when the museum was built, the main aim of natural
history was to reveal the marvels of God's creation.
By understanding nature we could understand the mind of God,
as a designer, but also, in Acland's words, as "the Everliving, Everworking,
Artist". Natural history was natural theology,
and the museum was to encapsulate what another of its founders, Richard Greswell,
called "God's own museum, the physical universe".
As you entered it, you were to be in no doubt that this was a Christian building.
The first artist who was asked to design the carvings above the arch was Thomas Woolner,
the one member of the original
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who was a sculptor by trade.
Woolner drew a design illustrating the fall of Man reminiscent of
Michelangelo's depiction of the same scene
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Given that according to the story
Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden for eating the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge, this would have been frankly an odd
emblem for a museum promoting knowledge of the natural world.
The contract for the design passed to another artist with Pre-Raphaelite
connections, John Hungerford Pollen, who chose to
focus not on the Fall but on redemption. Pollen's design still
illustrates the biblical story, with the different days of Creation up
the sides of the arch, and Jesus and an angel above it, but the
Tree of Knowledge has been replaced by the Tree of Life.
Eve is present but Adam oddly absent, though he is reinstated in the final
carving. Pollen's design was only partly carved
before the funding for the art at the museum ran out.
The days of Creation were left off which gave Acland the freedom many years
later to reinterpret the beautiful geometrical arrangement of plants
growing up the arch itself as a symbol of evolution. The most
striking change to the symbolism though is in the carving of an angel above the
arch. In Pollen's design he holds two books:
the Bible, or the Book of God, and the Book of
Nature itself, implicitly written in God's hand.
In the carving, the Book of Nature has been replaced by a disc
showing dividing cells. Cell theory was absolutely cutting-edge science when the
museum was built, bringing together botany, zoology and
medicine, as well as the technology of the microscopes which had first enabled
scientists to see cells barely 20 years before. It is a
remarkably fitting image for the museum's purpose,
teaching modern science at the heart of a Christian university.
In the next episode we will cross the threshold to see how Oxford's Victorian
scientists working with Woodward, the O'Sheas and the Pre-Raphaelites
used art to turn the museum's interior into an object lesson in science.
[Outro music]