1819 | London, England (Part 2)

Holophusikon > Leverian > Egyptian Hall

This is the second of two linked posts. In the first we met the common tailorbird (Orthotomus sutorius), and its uncommon nest-sewing abilities. You can catch that side of the story here, and as a reminder here’s one in Mumbai with her stitched and riveted nest:

The tailorbird was a sought-after Asian curio for eighteenth century collectors in England, as expeditions to the far reaches of the globe brought back news of never-before-seen animals and natural wonders.

That is, never-before-seen by the English. As those expeditions spread, they regularly trampled and destroyed local people and their cultures, who already knew all about those wonders because they lived with them on a daily basis, involving them in their games, their maps, their feasts and their cosmologies. But, as insignificant as it is beside the butchery of cultures, the English also discovered that there was a financial cost to collecting, one that drove successive London museums into bankruptcy.

It was those early museums—sometimes little more than scaled-up sideshow attractions—that allowed people in one tiny island off the northwest coast of Europe to meet new worlds. And if you’ve read Part 1, you’ll recall that the tailorbird stitched itself into the story of these museums through an 1819 auction lot, and its accompanying note:

The Tailor Bird, with its curious nest, from the Leverian Museum; the only ornithological specimen from that collection in the sale.

Which brings us to Part 2: the collectors.

Nature for sale

It’s springtime in 1819, and William Bullock—jeweller, collector, showman—needs money. So he’s selling off the large natural history and artefact collections of his pet project, the London Museum. He’s not the first to have to take this drastic step, as we’ll see: museums grow amidst the death of other museums, like Banksia plants after a fire.

The London Museum was housed in the spectacular Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, designed inside and out under Bullock’s instruction to resemble the then-fashionable—if fanciful—idea of an Egyptian temple. That’s it in the image at the top of this post. It was a literal temple of mysteries, ready for the wealthy of London to explore. You could see, for instance, the towering spotted beast that opens the Hall’s 1812 catalogue: the Cameleopard. (Or, as we know it today, a giraffe—both terms survive in the Latin name for the species, Giraffa camelopardalis.)

Bullock pieced together his collection over several decades. Before moving to London he’d shown the exhibits in Liverpool, as what he humbly called the Liverpool Museum. There were various stuffed mammals, reptiles and birds, as well as clothes and tools acquired with dubious levels of consent from people around the world, a selection of minerals, some insects, and an assortment of weapons and armour. Bullock even had some fragments of mammoth hair recently defrosted from Siberian ice, at a time when the very existence of mammoths was under debate.

This is the interior of the Egyptian Hall, showing its Pantherion, or animal gallery:

One valued source of Bullock’s curiosities was the earlier breakup of another popular museum, the Leverian. Ashton Lever’s museum was notable in part because it received many items from his friend James Cook’s journeys around the Pacific in the 1770s. Opening in London’s Leicester Square in February 1775, Lever gave his collection the grand title of Holophusikon, roughly meaning ‘all of nature’. Among its treasures were items donated by Cook’s scientific colleague Joseph Banks, several of which had never before been seen or described by Western naturalists.

The announcement of Lever’s museum’s opening thoughtfully noted that it might not be to everyone’s taste:

As Mr. Lever has in his collection some very curious monkies and monsters, which might disgust the Ladies, a separate room is appropriated for their exhibition, and the examination of those only who chuse it.

If you chuse to look, here’s the interior of the Holophusikon in 1785:

Lever had to knock down several walls to create his open plan design, perfect for an eighteenth century gentleman to stroll through as he marvelled at the curious cabinets. Even more remarkable, though, are the barriers knocked down by the painter of that image.

Sarah Stone began working with Ashton Lever as a natural history illustrator in the 1770s, while still in her teens. The daughter of a fan-painter, she had a natural gift for colour and form. She was only 25 when she painted the museum interior above. Far from being a Lady disgusted by monkies and monsters, Stone revelled in their vitality.

With her connections to Lever, Stone was the often the first person to paint the new animals arriving regularly from Australia, sent by the colony’s first Surgeon General, John White. Despite having only skins, written descriptions, and uncertain taxidermy to work from, she brought these animals back to glorious life. Neither the sulfur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita) on the left below, nor the rainbow lorikeet (Trichoglossus moluccanus) on the right—both native to Australia—were scientifically named until after she’d painted these images in the 1780s. The Sydney broad-tailed gecko in the bottom centre wasn’t classified yet either, for that matter.

Stone, later Sarah Smith after marriage, continued to produce remarkable illustrations throughout her life. She was even permitted to exhibit her work at the Royal Academy, although as an Honorary Exhibitor only, because she had the temerity to not be a man. With her ability to envision and skilfully create fresh things from simple materials, Stone was an artist and observer of the highest calibre, paving the way for painters such as the collaborators of John Gould—who gave us the tailorbird image that heads up Part 1—in the following century. If you’d like to know more, the Australian Museum has a page and gallery dedicated to her genius.

But back to the museum. Even while Stone painted for him, the now-Sir Ashton Lever was badly overspending on his collection. Deep in debt, in 1784 he had the brainwave to sell the entire Holophusicon in a lottery. It didn’t quite work out in his favour: he sold around 8,000 tickets at a guinea each (roughly £80 today) but that was far short of the 36,000 tickets he’d hoped for. The lottery proceeded anyway, with the lucky winner picked in March 1786. James Parkinson, a Law Stationer from Holborn with ticket No. 34,119, suddenly owned over 25,000 curious objects, monkies and monsters included. Parkinson’s luck was double-edged: the winning ticket was bought by his wife, and was only found among her belongings after she passed away before the lottery draw.

The loss of the museum reportedly affected Lever deeply. He died in January 1788, possibly by his own hand. All he had left of his once grand collection were Sarah Stone’s paintings, which he’d carefully ensured were not part of the lottery.

Parkinson tried to continue the renamed Leverian Museum, but it continued to prove expensive, even after he moved it from Leicester Square across the Thames to Blackfriars. In the late 1700s Parkinson offered to sell the whole lot to the British Museum or Catherine the Great of Russia, both of whom turned him down. So in 1806 he sold it all off at an auction that took more than two months to finish. Sitting in the audience was showman and collector William Bullock.

Let’s have one farewell view of the Grand Saloon and Gallery of the Leverian Museum, in its short-lived new home at the Blackfriars Rotunda. The engraving is, naturally, based on a drawing by Sarah Stone:

We’ve now caught back up with Bullock and his Egyptian Hall, the final in a trifecta—Holophusikon, Leverian, London Museum—of financially troubled institutions. Like Parkinson a decade before, with Bullock’s expenses mounting he tried to unload his materials onto the British Museum as a job lot. No deal. He even unsuccessfully tried direct selling, by including a private gallery within his museum in which

Valuable curiosities of every description…are allowed to remain on sale for one season, without expense, unless actually sold, when 10 per Cent. will be charged on the amount.

And so, in the spring of 1819, with Bullock acting as his own auctioneer, the London Museum fragmented into thousands of separate pieces. Some went into private hands, some into museums in Vienna, Edinburgh, Holland and Paris. Even the British Museum purchased a few, in the end.

It’s certainly plausible that some of James Cook’s collected items made their way from the Holophusicon via the Leverian to Bullock. A Tongan fighting club, now in New Zealand’s Te Papa Museum, is one such object. The only mounted specimen of the Tahiti sandpiper (Prosobonia leucoptera), now extinct, may likewise have ventured from Cook to Bullock to its current resting place in the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands. Here it is, forever gazing upwards, never to see another of its kind:

In subsequent years Bullock would go on to import Scandinavian reindeer to London to breed for meat (it didn't work), to speculate in silver in Mexico, and to unsuccessfully found a health utopia in Kentucky named ‘Hygeia’. But our journey is with the museums and those pieces that moved one by one among them, not with him. Specifically, do we know what happened to that tailorbird and its curious nest?

Where are they now?

Unfortunately, to be honest, it’s not clear. Lot 61 on the eleventh day of Egyptian Hall’s grand auction was bought by a Mr. Ledbrook for £2 7s, according to an annotated copy of the sale catalogue. Ledbrook was buying that day on behalf of Lord Temple (or Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville to his friends, and ‘Lord Grenville's fat nephew’ to the press of the day). Whether the bird remains in his family’s collections to this day is unknown.

Less than a week after that sale, a second tailorbird nest went up at Bullock’s auction, this time with a pair of tailorbirds attached. That lot was bought by Lord Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby, for £3 15s—these examples should give you the gist of the kind of wealthy bidders at the auction. Lord Stanley also happened to be the patron of Edward Lear, who contributed to John Gould’s bird books, and Stanley’s extensive animal collection forms the basis of the zoology holdings in the World Museum in Liverpool. It would be fitting to think that at least a few of Bullock’s tailorbirds returned to Liverpool after all their travels.

Still, finding a home in a respected institution was no guarantee of a specimen surviving the nineteenth century. Richard Bowdler Sharpe, curator of birds for the British Museum, lamented in 1906 that:

It was the custom, not only in the British Museum, but in every other museum in Europe, to mount every specimen of value in the public galleries: the more valuable the specimen, the more was it exposed in the gallery, there to perish.

Those that do survive are in a fragile state, such as this tailorbird nest collected in Macau in 1904 and now in London’s Natural History Museum:

And it’s not just nests or taxidermy that perish with the passage of time. The buildings that housed the Holophusikon, the Egyptian Hall and the Blackfriars Rotunda used by James Parkinson have all been demolished. Leicester House, one-time home of both the Prince of Wales and later Lever’s museum on the north side of Leicester Square, was replaced by houses in 1791. There’s a cinema and casinos there now. Egyptian Hall lasted until 1905, when its site to the west of Piccadilly Circus was absorbed into an upmarket shopping district. Finally, the Rotunda went through a series of lives as a music hall, meeting place and a pub, before also succombing to developers in 1958. The columns from Sarah Stone’s drawing were visible in the ruins as it was torn down:

Our journey through forgotten museums has been an unusual one for this blog. Hopefully, though, it gives some useful context to the social mix in which the western world discovered our planet’s extraordinary variety of life. It’s also a reminder that nature—and the human institutions dedicated to it—are often much more fragile than we’d like.

Sources: Sharpe, R.B. (1906). Birds. In Lankester, E.R. (Ed.) The history of the collections contained in the natural history departments of the British Museum. pp. 79-515. London. || Bullock, W. (1812) A companion to Mr. Bullock's London Museum and Pantherion: containing a brief description of upwards of fifteen thousand natural and foreign curiosities, antiquities, and productions of the fine arts collected during seventeen years of arduous research, and at an expense of thirty thousand pounds; and now open for public inspection in the Egyptian Temple, just erected for its reception, in Picadilly, London, opposite the end of Bond Street. London; https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/92074 || Popova, M. (2019) Trailblazing 18th-Century Artist Sarah Stone’s Stunning Natural History Paintings of Exotic, Endangered, and Extinct Species; https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/03/12/sarah-stone-natural-history-illustration/ || Medway, D. (1979) Some ornithological results of Cook's third voyage. Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 9: 315-351. || Levy, M. (1997) The Roman Gallery at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly and some Tripods by William Bullock and George Bullock. Furniture History 33:229-239. || Jansen, J. et al. (2021) The history of the sole surviving mount of Tahiti Sandpiper Prosobonia leucoptera. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists Club 141:127-132.

Main image credit: Thomas Shepherd; Wellcome Library no. 40283i; https://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1198104 || Second image credit: Peter Hills; https://www.worldbirdphotos.com/photo/tailorbird-common-orthotomus-sutorius-in-nest-india/ || Third image credit: Thomas Shepherd; https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pnpj8x98 || Fourth image credit: Sarah Stone, Perspective (Interior) View of Sir Ashton Lever's Museum, Leicester Square, London, 1785, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales || Fifth image credits: Sarah Stone; in White (1789-90) Journal of a voyage to New South Wales. London. || Sixth image credit: Sarah Stone & Charles Reuben Ryley || Seventh image credit: Jansen et al. (2021) || Eighth image credit: Natural History Museum, London; https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-bird-that-stitches-its-home.html || Ninth image credit: Southwark Local History Library; http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p17011/html/ch09.xhtml