Inside Out: Representing the Romantic Museum

This exhibition examines how museum spaces were conceptualized and visually represented in two-dimensional media forms, drawing examples principally from metropolitan London. Many of the museums of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century no longer exist. However, prints and paintings, often reproduced in gallery guides, periodicals, and ephemera, are valuable sources of information about the objects that they contained: from oddities and marvels to natural history specimens and revered artworks. Such images also document the arrangement of objects and the display strategies employed by collectors and museums, as well as the visual idioms—and aesthetic categories—they used to capture and ‘frame’ their interiors. The contents of collections, and the manner in which they were presented to the world, closely reflect predominant paradigms for the organization of knowledge, which were undergoing significant change in the Romantic period. The exhibition explores how public institutions and independent collectors, in both public and private exhibition spaces, represented natural history, human biology, emerging technologies, and archaeological discoveries, and how these displays were, in turn, represented by artists.