Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (43 page)

T
he objects Bushell was selecting for South Kensington and the British Museum, and the increasing number of pieces being sent to London by travellers from around the world, were creating something of a dilemma. With their odd symbolism, their unfamiliar materials and their sometimes naïve techniques, they were not easy to classify. Were they really art? Museum staff found it difficult to decide whether such things deserved to be displayed alongside European objects or whether their very difference marked them out as cultural curiosities, of social instead of artistic value, and inferior to the established displays. Bushell's Chinese objects were shown along with other foreign works, mainly on loan from private collectors, in the aptly named ‘East Cloister' at South Kensington. It was here, at the edge of the museum, that visitors could see pieces from overseas, set out to dazzle and intrigue. The gallery was colourful and exotic, specially decorated in elaborate mock-oriental designs that emphasized its difference, and hung with objects that even the most diligent student of art would never have seen before. It was
deliberately distinctive, distinguished by a kind of alluring otherness that set it apart from the rest of the museum. The damp grey of the London streets receded as visitors were invited to step into another world and to discover the strange skills and odd tastes of the people who lived there.

The gallery was far more than just a window on other cultures: it was at the same time a way of ordering and controlling the unfamiliar and unknown. Persia, China, India and Japan fascinated the nineteenth-century public. The apparently vast markets for British exports, as well as the promise of imported luxury goods such as teas and silks, excited merchants, shipowners and shopkeepers. Political uncertainty in many Eastern countries held out the prospect of the further expansion of British territory and fired imperial ambitions. But, above all, many Victorians were seduced by the idea of a glamorous Orient, a place of sultry nights, outlandish wildlife and bizarre sensual rituals. They were intrigued by news of each new discovery and were anxious to see for themselves the unexpected and beautiful objects that emerged from the East.

The new wonders of Japan, for example, were a source of endless fascination to many ordinary Victorians. When Augustus Franks first joined the British Museum in 1851, Japan was still a closed country, governed by a policy called
sakoku
that had been in place since 1639 and which prevented the Japanese from travelling abroad and foreigners from entering the country. Little information about Japan leaked out, and few things: a small concession of the Dutch East India Company in Nagasaki supplied Europe's palaces with fine porcelain exports, known as ‘Old Japan', from the 1660s onwards, but the only chance most people had had of seeing Japanese objects was the tiny handful of items included in the 1851 Great Exhibition, under the auspices of the Chinese display. In the 1850s, however,
sakoku
ended abruptly after the American naval commander Commodore Perry forced the Japanese to sign a ‘Treaty of Peace and Amity' (or
Treaty of Kanagawa) in 1854. By the end of the decade, Japan had links with most Western nations, including a further treaty in 1858 which opened three of its ports to British traders.

Suddenly, Japanese art and antiquity were available to collectors – and they took full advantage. During the 1860s and 1870s, in Britain and France, the fashion for collecting Japanese artefacts was intense. A special term was coined in 1872 to describe enthusiasts –
Japonistes
– and netsuke (miniature sculptures) and tsuba (sword-guards), in particular, were enthusiastically acquired by Westerners. The influence of Japanese objects and aesthetics was felt across fashionable and artistic society: Degas, Renoir, Whistler, Monet and Gauguin were among the painters influenced by Japan, while, in the Victorian home, Japanese-inspired jewellery, ceramics, furnishings and wallpapers became hugely desirable. In 1875, Liberty's opened in London's Regent Street as a specialist supplier of Japanese goods, and in the popular theatre works such as Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera
The Mikado
(1885) continued the craze for all things Japanese towards the end of the century.

But such widespread enthusiasm for new cultures and their objects was not without a darker dimension. There was also a sense of alarm, a niggling fear that disorder and disruption might creep into Britain from these mysterious lands with their weird customs. In many museums, the strange ethnographic objects from beyond the usual Western canon of art were shown together as evidence of the ‘backwardness' of other cultures, rather than as beautiful and valuable objects in their own right. They were generally classed as wondrous oddities rather than being afforded the status of art, and were often displayed alongside natural history specimens to make a point about racial progress. African objects, in particular, seemed to emphasize to the Victorians the gulf of racial difference and these, of all pieces, were most commonly kept separate from more familiar works of art. When Henry Townsend, a young missionary, first travelled to Sierra
Leone in 1836, and then on to Abeokuta, a Egba kingdom inland from Lagos in 1843, he was bewildered and distinctly unnerved by the vastness of Africa, by the heat, the darkness, the wary tribespeople and the primitive transport arrangements, but as he settled into African life during the 1850s and 1860s it was the objects which occupied his attention. As well as converting suspicious worshippers to his God and energetically spreading the Christian message, Townsend took time to barter with the heathen villagers, and was frequently delighted with the unusual jewellery, sculptures and vessels he discovered. While fellow churchmen at home were collecting Anglo-Saxon archaeology or Greek antiquities to display in their parlours, Townsend demonstrated a more adventurous taste.

Regular shipments from Britain brought Townsend personal supplies and the kinds of things any active missionary might require: Bibles direct from Queen Victoria, money collected for the building of a church, and a steel corn-mill from Prince Albert for the practical improvement of African life. In return, he sent back colourful and curious things. Many of these objects simply confirmed to friends back in Britain just how much the Egba people needed European culture and values: an Eshu fetish figure, given to Townsend by Chief Ogubonna, for example, had been used at his door to protect against witchcraft before his conversion to Christianity. Back in Exeter, Townsend's home town, no one had ever seen anything quite like the strange African objects. Staff at the museum received Townsend's parcels with some consternation and in the end the decision was taken to keep all the African works physically separate from the main museum, carefully displaying them instead in a ‘temporary depot' set apart from the displays of Western painting and sculpture.
¹

Even once it was agreed that ethnographic objects did not constitute art, however, it was still not easy to decide on an authoritative way of exhibiting them. During the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, collectors tended to adopt one of three different approaches to ethnographic display. There was the eclectic gentleman's cabinet of curiosities which could easily accommodate a random collection of objects of varying significance and needed little philosophical rationale beyond the driving passions of the individual collector. Then there was the model adopted by collectors like Walter Scott or Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Pitt Rivers, who brought together 20,000 objects from across the world and gave them to the University of Oxford in 1884. This type of display often focused on arms and armour, and removed the works from any social or geographical context. Instead, it emphasized visual similarities and encouraged the visitor to follow the development of each type of object in a linear way, from the simplest to more complex forms: ‘Specimens were arranged according to their affinities, the simpler on the left and the successive improvements in line to the right of them,' explained Pitt Rivers in 1874.
²
The displays positioned objects along these evolutionary timelines from primitive to modern, irrespective of the actual date they were made. They tended to enforce strict hierarchies and, in doing so, stressed racial differences. Taking up the work of anthropologists, the layout aimed to reveal the history of humanity and compare the cultures of different peoples. It was implicitly understood that the examples from distant countries were, even if modern, really only of value as evidence of the more primitive stages of Western development rather than as objects of a specific place and culture.

Finally, from the 1780s onwards, as explorers like Captain Cook brought ever more artefacts back to Britain, there was a growth in the third model of display: contextualized shows defined by geography. The enthusiasm for foreign objects by now could mean that sometimes over half the pieces on display in public museums had been shipped to Britain from far away, and plenty of galleries offered a ‘South Sea Room', for example, or indeed an ‘East
Cloister'.
³
Increasingly, merchants, diplomats, sailors, soldiers and churchmen were all taking time off from their trades to send things back to entertain and astound the public. A sledge rescued from William Parry's expedition to find the North-West Passage; a ‘pair of garters worn by the Queen of Tahiti'; costume, ornaments, baskets and bowls from South America, Madagascar and the Philippines collected by plant-hunter John Gould Veitch; ‘a valuable tortoiseshell comb, of immense size, as worn by the ladies of Mexico'; and a ‘twentyfive Rupee note apparently Burmese, printed on native paper, taken from the body of a Rebel Sepoy shot by the donor at the recapture of Dharwalagiri in the Nepaul mountains' are just some of the objects I have seen noted in contemporary accessions registers.
⁴

Following the third model of display, these various artefacts were sorted into orderly presentations defined by geography, and cases and printed guides were arranged to show material specific to one culture, such as the Canadian Inuit. Again, there was little sense of chronology. Objects were clearly linked to ideas of voyage and adventure rather than to historical scholarship, and were often shown to give visitors an idea of what travel might be like in strange and distant lands instead of examining cultural development in any detail. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this last approach to display became the most common – at the British Museum, the galleries were arranged geographically for over half a century, from 1808.

Yet the controversial question of how to classify and display such objects was far from resolved. In the 1860s, the unspoken principles behind these display choices were increasingly brought out into the open and discussed in public. During a decade of change, popular ideas about overseas cultures were challenged, and curators and collectors began to look again at the way their collections were presented. Previous work on evolution was transformed by the publication of Charles Darwin's
On the Origin
of Species
in 1859, followed by Herbert Spencer's work on evolution and natural selection,
Principles of Biology
, in 1864 and, at the end of the decade, Francis Galton's experiments based on theories of biological inheritance. Traditional religious beliefs seemed to be under threat, scientific opinion was divided and often confusing, and the very nature of humankind was up for reconsideration. As debates raged, ethnographic collections in museums and in private hands were inevitably caught up in the fray. How and what people collected, and how these things might be displayed, became connected to controversies over race, religion, biology and ‘the survival of the fittest'.

As Darwinian ideas spread, the evolution of human societies became the topic of urgent debate, as did the relationship between technologically advanced countries such as Britain and more apparently primitive cultures. Ethnographic collecting and display was at the heart of this discussion, providing for ‘the scientific study of manners and customs of particular peoples' and showing, according to the British Museum, ‘their development from savagery towards civilization'.
⁵
Displays of objects were an excellent way of presenting the complex intellectual ideas underpinning evolution. Visitors were encouraged to marvel at simple native objects, and draw comparisons with the ‘better', more refined examples of pottery, clothing, jewellery, tools or artworks in their own homes. Foreign pieces were a source of entertainment, even laughter; the displays offered an experience comparable to travelling shows of living ‘exotic' people that toured throughout Europe, becoming particularly popular during the 1870s and 1880s, and exhibiting novelties like Laplanders herding reindeer or African bushmen preparing meals. Closely linked to principles of social evolution, the display of ethnographic artefacts reinforced the Victorians' view of themselves as advanced, sophisticated and superior.