The African collection at the Hood Museum of Art

African Arts, Summer, 2004 by Barbara Thompson

The history of the Hood Museum of Art and its African collection is intricately entwined with the unique character of Dartmouth College, the nation's ninth oldest college and a member of the Ivy League (Bass 1985:16). Dartmouth College was founded in 1769 by Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, a Congregational minister from Connecticut, in the town of Hanover in the Royal Province of New Hampshire. Chartered by King George III, the college provided

   for the education and instruction of youth of the Indian
   Tribes in this land in reading, writing, and all parts of
   learning which shall appear necessary and expedient for
   civilizing and christianizing children of pagans, as well as
   in all liberal arts and sciences, and also of English youth
   and any others. (1)

Because he considered the primary mission of his school, as outlined in the Charter of Dartmouth College, "to encourage the laudable and charitable design of spreading Christian knowledge among the savages of our American wilderness, and also that the best means of education be established in our province of New Hampshire, for the benefit of said province," Rev. Wheelock chose as the college's motto vox clamantis in deserto, "a voice crying in the wilderness" (Isaiah 40:3). In this context, the "voice" represented the expression of religion in the darkness of an unsettled region, particularly because Dartmouth's remote location in the midst of New England's "wilderness" inspired a rigorous desire to further the understanding between life, God, and his creation. Echoing the excitement of colonizing a New World, the allegiance of America's intellectuals to the Enlightenment, and the religious devotion of New England's European settlers, the college's mission engaged Dartmouth students with classifiable examples of the "natural and moral world" embodied by scientific, ethnographic, archaeological, and natural history teachings and specimens (Bass 1985:10). These were the same perspectives that invited and directed the humble beginnings of a young Dartmouth College museum.

The Multifarious History of an Ethnographic Collection

The first reference to the development of a museum at Dartmouth College dates to 1772, when David McClure wrote to Rev. Wheelock that he had "collected a few curious Elephants Bones found about six hundred miles down the Ohio, for the young Museum at Dartmouth," thereafter referred to as the Dartmouth College Museum (Bowen 1958:1). (2) The beginning of the museum's interest in the African continent came soon thereafter. As recorded in the Worcester Massachusetts Spy and the Boston Columbian Centinel, on September 7, 1796, Elias Hasket Derby of Salem, Massachusetts, gave the Dartmouth College Museum a "large number of curiosities," including a stuffed African zebra (Bass 1985:13). According to Dartmouth lore, "unlike a properly regulated museum piece, [the zebra] was in the habit of appearing in incongruous places, such as the roof of the chapel or the belfry of the 'College' [Dartmouth Hall], thus requiring laborious transportation back to its normal abode" (Richardson 1932:251-2).

Dartmouth's interest in material culture from the African continent is directly linked to the history of one of its students, John Ledyard (1751-89), who attended the college for one year in 1772 and was the first American in Egypt. After shipping with Captain Cook to the Pacific and crossing Siberia, Ledyard was engaged by the African Association of London to explore the Nile and the Niger but died in Cairo at the outset of that trip. On August 15, 1788, Ledyard wrote from Alexandria, Egypt,

   A pillar called the pillar of Pompey & an obelisk called
   Cleopatra's are now almost the only remains of great Antiquity.
   They are both and particularly the former noble subjects
   to see and contemplate & certainly more captivating for
   the contrasting dessert [sic] and forlorn prospects around
   them (Oliver 1979).

Museum records confirm that before 1810, a Mr. S. Dinsmore donated two syenite fragments of Pompey's pillar from Alexandria--one of which is still extant in the museum (13.158.4255). (3) Although the actual date of the acquisition of these two fragments remains unknown, it is possible that Ledyard's 1788 reference to this very same pillar was the impetus behind the collection and subsequent acquisition of these fragments by the museum.

The fascination with ancient Egyptian "curiosities" in these early years of the Dartmouth College Museum continued when, in 1838, Frederick Hall (Class of 1803) (4) donated an Egyptian mummy mask (Fig. 1) from the Old Kingdom, 2465-2150 B.C.; two fresco fragments from the Tomb of Kings in the Lower Chamber, Thebes, 18th Dynasty; a mummy cloth with embalming; and other objects no longer extant in the museum. Although these objects are of little scholarly interest today, they are wonderful examples of the kinds of "curios" that were being collected by Dartmouth College Museum during the first half of the nineteenth century in the interest of exploration and adventure.