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 two episodes we looked at
the art and architecture of the main museum,
on the façade, and in the central court. In this episode we're going to move
beyond its more familiar spaces to look at how individual teaching rooms
designed for particular scientific disciplines were enhanced by the arts.
The 19th century saw the maturing of many scientific disciplines
and the birth of many more. At the beginning of the century, most of what we
would now think of as the sciences were little more than distinct lines of
inquiry within either natural philosophy or natural history. These terms match
very approximately our own distinctions between the physical sciences and the
life sciences, or between experimental and
observational methods. Even the word 'scientists' did not exist
until it was coined by the Cambridge philosopher William Hewell
at an early meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science in 1833. By the 1850s, however, when Oxford
University Museum of Natural History was planned and built,
science had already begun to fragment into multiple different disciplines.
This early plan of the museum shows how these disciplines were built into its
structure. The northeast corner comprises a suite
of rooms for studying Physiology and Zoology,
including the rather macabre sounding Anatomical Yard.
In the northwest we have Medicine, moving around to Chemistry in the southwest and
then onto rooms for Experimental Philosophy,
Geology and Mineralogy. There are bespoke lecture rooms, dissecting rooms, and
laboratories for the different departments,
as well as offices for the professors and sitting rooms where they may have
read, met their students, or perhaps just taken
tea. Upstairs, there was a large lecture theatre,
a library and a reading room, plus departments for Entomology,
Geometry and Astronomy. The east wall of the museum was left blank for a
prospective extension. An opportunity for this came along in
the 1880s when General Augustus Pitt Rivers
gave his anthropological collection to the University, so that became in effect
the anthropology department as well as the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Another extension, the first purpose-built physics
laboratory in England, opened in 1872. When Charles Daubeny, one of the leaders
of the campaign to build the museum, described it as the "temple of science"
he imagined the rooms around the museum court as the "chambers of the ministering
priests". Each priest worshiped science in his own
way but they all met together in the sanctuary of the temple –
the central court – where the museum's main collections were displayed
and where all the scientific disciplines could come together.
As we have seen throughout this series so far, Oxford University Museum of
Natural History was built for scientists who valued art
and saw it as integral to the teaching and celebration of science.
Equally, the artists they worked with, including John Ruskin and the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, valued and respected science, insisting
that art should be judged by the same exacting standards of rigor and truth.
This reciprocal relationship between art and science can be seen throughout the
decorative schema at the museum, in the spaces designed for individual
disciplines, as well as across the façade and in the central court.
Like so many building projects, the museum went over budget
so only some rooms were decorated before the funding ran out.
During the 20th century, many of its larger spaces were repurposed,
with the Library split by mezzanines into storage and office spaces,
and a new ceiling put in the Lecture Theatre. The decoration of the museum was
only ever incomplete then, and of that only parts remain. But there
are two rooms in particular that are not usually open to the public
where we can see how art could be used to teach science in Victorian England.
The museum's first director, or Keeper as he was called,
was the geologist John Phillips. Phillips was committed to the use of art and
architecture to teach science. As we saw in the last episode he planned
the decorative schema around the museum's central court,
choosing the marbles for the columns and which plants should be carved on their capitals.
It must have been with Phillips's
personal approval then, that the Reverend Richard St John Tyrwhitt
painted two huge murals on the walls of the Geology lecture room.
Like so many of the people involved in designing and decorating the museum,
Tyrwhitt was a disciple of John Ruskin. It's not clear who chose the subjects
for the two murals but Phillips must have been consulted,
and Ruskin too seems to have been involved. One of them depicts the
Mer de Glace in the French alps. In 1854, Ruskin had
visited this huge glacier, now sadly largely melted as a result of
climate change. He had arranged for a daguerreotype
photograph to be taken of it, which he may well have lent to Tyrwhitt as
an oil painting of the glacier by Tyrwhitt owned by the museum bears a very close
resemblance to Ruskin's photo. For the mural Tyrwhitt imagined a
different view of the glacier altogether, looking out onto this sea of ice
surrounded by bare mountain tops from the mouth of a cave.
The second mural on the opposite wall is a view out over the Bay of Naples from
the slopes of Vesuvius, with the bare and jagged black rocks in
the foreground made from the volcano's hardened lava.
The students who listened to Phillips's lectures in this very room in the 1860s
would have had constant reminders of the great forces and principles of geology
looming over them on either side: ice and fire,
erosion and eruption. It is easy to imagine that Phillips even used them as
visual aids in his own lectures. If you had gone upstairs from the
Geology lecture room to the same corridor on the balcony above, you might have
found yourself in another of the museum's most
distinctive rooms. When the museum was founded, the
entomologist Frederick William Hope endowed Oxford's first chair in Zoology.
A decade earlier, Hope had given thousands of specimens of insects to
Oxford University, so when the museum was built a large
room was designated as Mr Hope's Entomological Museum,
to house and display this collection. Like the Geology lecture room, the Hope
Museum – now known as the Westwood Room after John Obadiah Westwood, the first
Hope Professor – illustrates its discipline in its art.
The centrepiece of the room is a fireplace carved by Edward Whelan,
one of the three Irish stonemasons who executed most of the remarkable
decorative sculpture at the museum. Whelan's low relief freeze below the
mantelpiece features two of Britain's most charismatic insects:
the Stag Beetle and the Death's Head Hawk Moth.
From an artistic perspective the Stag Beetle is visibly impressive, while the
Death's Head Hawk Moth suggests an ominous symbolism.
But these carvings are not merely decorative; they illustrate too
the sexual dimorphism, life cycles, and habitats of these two species.
The beetles and their larvae are shown on oak leaves; the moths, caterpillar and
chrysalis on potatoes. Not only are these the favourite foods of
these two insects, but they're also key crops for timber and food,
emblems of the British Isles and cornerstones of British and Irish
livelihoods for centuries. The Hope Museum's fireplace carved by
Whelan, surely with Westwood's guidance, is an object lesson in entomology,
showing not only how insects grow but how their lives are bound up in ecology,
economics, and culture. Even the wall decorations,
lovingly painted by yet another of Ruskin's disciples called Henry Swan,
hint at the room's scientific purpose, as leaves and twigs seem to transform into
insects before our very eyes. Like most of the men who taught at
Oxford when the museum first opened in 1860,
Phillips and Westwood were committed natural theologians for whom natural
history was the study of God's creation. In the last episode of this series we
will see what happened to the science and the art of the museum
when this world view collided with the new evolutionary theories
of Charles Darwin.