Editorial

A "Museum" in the American sense of the word means a place of amusement, wherein there shall be a theatre, some wax figures, a giant and a dwarf or two, a jumble of pictures, and a few live snakes. In order that there may be some excuse for the use of the word, there is in most instances a collection of stuffed birds, a few preserved animals, and a stock of oddly assorted and very dubitable curiosities; but the mainstay of the "Museum" is the "live art," that is, the theatrical performance, the precocious manikins, or the intellectual dogs and monkeys.

Edward P. Hingston, The Genial Showman.

Being Reminiscences of the Life of Artemus Ward, 1870

The development of the museum from its emergence in ancient Greece through the proliferation of cabinets of natural and artificial curiosities in the United States in the nineteenth century is a long and fascinating story From the time his museum opened in July 1786 in Philadelphia, Charles Wilson Peale hoped to attract government support to make his a truly national museum. He wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1802 that such an institution would be "more powerful to humanize the mind, promote the harmony and aid virtue, than any other School yet imagined." Peale knew that the great museums of Europe started as private collections and then became state supported, and he expected his own to follow the pattern.

Peale's Museum was one of the first popular museums of natural science and art. It was born of his revolutionary idea that museums should be for everyone, not just the cognoscenti or rich amateurs. Actual specimens were systematically arranged and documented, encouraging research, and fostering the "diffusion of knowledge" by a process known as "rational amusement"--enjoyment while learning. The educational theory behind this came from Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Nathaniel Hawthorne poked fun at the museums antiquarians assembled in a story entitled "A Virtuoso's Collection," first published in 1842. In his flight of fancy he described a museum (actually the East India Marine Society of Salem, Massachusetts, founded in 1799) where the stuffed animals included the wolf that ate Little Red Riding Hood, Cerberus, Dr. Johnson's cat Hodge, Shelley's skylark, and "Coleridge's albatross, transfixed with the Ancient Mariner's crossbow shaft" Among the rarities were Charlemagne's sheepskin cloak, Nero's fiddle, and the chisel used by Phidias.

Museums became businesses, and what was good for business proved to be entertainment--drama, music, and freak shows. This approach reached its peak with Phineas Taylor Barnum, who obtained and scattered the Peale collection and launched his American Museum on Broadway in New York City Human oddities and novelty acts drew more paying customers than cases of stuffed birds.

In the 1870s an awareness developed that works of art were not simply curiosities but had an aesthetic existence of their own. Works of art were then removed from history and science museums and enshrined in museums of their own. Among these new art museums were the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, both founded in 1870; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, founded in 1876; and the Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879. Symbolic of the new separation is the juxtaposition of New York's Metropolitan Museum on one side of Central Park and the American Museum of Natural History and the New-York Historical Society on the other.

Wendell Garrett

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