Dora Thornton on her book, which sheds new light on a remarkable collection given to the British Museum by Baron Ferdinand Rothschild
On 11 June, the British Museum opened a new gallery dedicated to the Waddesdon Bequest, a collection of medieval and Renaissance treasures left to the museum by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in 1898. As the curator of the collection and the new gallery, I have had a fascinating three years reimagining the bequest.
My book, A Rothschild Renaissance, explores how the bequest presents a snapshot in the self-fashioning of a new European dynasty, one that helped shape the modern world. The Rothschilds rose from the Frankfurt ghetto to become bankers to the whole of Europe within two generations in the 19th century.
They invested their wealth in art, using objects to tell stories about European history and the role of their family in it. My book takes 38 objects from the bequest to show how
this worked. Like the gallery it accompanies, the publication is intended to reward those that look at things in detail.
The new display, funded by the Rothschild Foundation, relocates the collection within the history of the British Museum. It is now part of the grand suite of former library spaces on the ground floor, which are dedicated to the history of collecting.
The gallery, designed by Stanton Williams, reconnects the bequest with Waddesdon Manor, Baron Ferdinand’s splendid Renaissance-style mansion in Buckinghamshire. The collection would once have been viewed through wreaths of cigar smoke in the smoking room there, where Baron Ferdinand often showed guests the treasures he collected.
He saw himself as an actor in the historical process by which private collections moved inexorably into the public domain. He went further by declaring that the public opening of the British Museum, to which he was to leave his cabinet collection, marked “the establishment of art as an institution”.
The bequest is a treasury of intricate objects of virtuoso craftsmanship, of the kind formed by princes and nobles in Renaissance Europe. Known as Kunstkammern, these art collections became identified with the dynasties that created them. The court collections in Dresden, Vienna, Munich and Kassel became demonstrations of power through artistic taste and discernment.
These collections are particularly associated with the Hapsburgs, as the ruling family of over half the known world in the 16th century, but also with the new banking dynasties of the Medici and Fugger, obvious models for the later, 19th-century Rothschilds. Many of the splendid objects in the bequest could have come straight from one of these family collections.
Provenance mattered: the attraction of busts made by Conrad Meit – of Margaret of Austria and Philibert of Savoy – was not just down to their virtuosity, but to the fact that they had belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II. A miniature tabernacle carved in boxwood came in a case incised with the arms of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Three amazing treasures, including the Cellini Bell, had belonged to the great British collector Horace Walpole.
The lockets called the Lyte Jewel and Grenville Jewel illuminated British history and royalty, while the Pressburg Cup would have been a secular dining object. The book and the gallery display are concerned with three relationships: people to objects, people to spaces and objects to spaces. The research and writing of the book have therefore underpinned every aspect of the display to reflect the British Museum’s aim to reinterpret
the Waddesdon Bequest for the 21st century.
Dora Thornton is the curator of the Renaissance collections at the British Museum, London
On 11 June, the British Museum opened a new gallery dedicated to the Waddesdon Bequest, a collection of medieval and Renaissance treasures left to the museum by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in 1898. As the curator of the collection and the new gallery, I have had a fascinating three years reimagining the bequest.
My book, A Rothschild Renaissance, explores how the bequest presents a snapshot in the self-fashioning of a new European dynasty, one that helped shape the modern world. The Rothschilds rose from the Frankfurt ghetto to become bankers to the whole of Europe within two generations in the 19th century.
They invested their wealth in art, using objects to tell stories about European history and the role of their family in it. My book takes 38 objects from the bequest to show how
this worked. Like the gallery it accompanies, the publication is intended to reward those that look at things in detail.
The new display, funded by the Rothschild Foundation, relocates the collection within the history of the British Museum. It is now part of the grand suite of former library spaces on the ground floor, which are dedicated to the history of collecting.
The gallery, designed by Stanton Williams, reconnects the bequest with Waddesdon Manor, Baron Ferdinand’s splendid Renaissance-style mansion in Buckinghamshire. The collection would once have been viewed through wreaths of cigar smoke in the smoking room there, where Baron Ferdinand often showed guests the treasures he collected.
He saw himself as an actor in the historical process by which private collections moved inexorably into the public domain. He went further by declaring that the public opening of the British Museum, to which he was to leave his cabinet collection, marked “the establishment of art as an institution”.
The bequest is a treasury of intricate objects of virtuoso craftsmanship, of the kind formed by princes and nobles in Renaissance Europe. Known as Kunstkammern, these art collections became identified with the dynasties that created them. The court collections in Dresden, Vienna, Munich and Kassel became demonstrations of power through artistic taste and discernment.
These collections are particularly associated with the Hapsburgs, as the ruling family of over half the known world in the 16th century, but also with the new banking dynasties of the Medici and Fugger, obvious models for the later, 19th-century Rothschilds. Many of the splendid objects in the bequest could have come straight from one of these family collections.
Provenance mattered: the attraction of busts made by Conrad Meit – of Margaret of Austria and Philibert of Savoy – was not just down to their virtuosity, but to the fact that they had belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II. A miniature tabernacle carved in boxwood came in a case incised with the arms of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Three amazing treasures, including the Cellini Bell, had belonged to the great British collector Horace Walpole.
The lockets called the Lyte Jewel and Grenville Jewel illuminated British history and royalty, while the Pressburg Cup would have been a secular dining object. The book and the gallery display are concerned with three relationships: people to objects, people to spaces and objects to spaces. The research and writing of the book have therefore underpinned every aspect of the display to reflect the British Museum’s aim to reinterpret
the Waddesdon Bequest for the 21st century.
Dora Thornton is the curator of the Renaissance collections at the British Museum, London
