200 years of Bristol Museum

One afternoon in 1850, the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was on his way out of the British Museum when he met its latest acquisition – a ‘winged beast’ from Assyria – being hoisted in. He was so struck by the encounter that he set to work on a poem, The Burden of Nineveh, imagining the centuries the sculpted figure had lain hidden in darkness before being rediscovered and brought to London. The poem ends with Rossetti looking forward to a time when Britain’s empire will, like the Assyrian, have crumbled into dust, and speculates on what those who rediscover the winged beast amid the ruins of London will make of it.

Although the poem is very much of its time, it neatly encapsulates the value of museums as places where we can step out of the present to convene not only with the past but also with the future. If you walk through the doors of Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, for example, and turn into a gallery on the right, you’ll be confronted – as Rossetti was –with a winged figure carved in Assyria almost three millennia ago, which was dug up and brought here in the 1850s.

Whether you’ll make as much of it as he did is another matter. Certainly, its enigmatic monumentality gives little hint of day-to-day life in the society that produced it. Walk into the next gallery, though, which houses the museum’s collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts, and you’ll find it packed with everyday objects, some of which – such as toys which parents placed in their children’s graves in the hope that they would play with them in the afterlife – it is almost impossible not to be moved by.

As far as looking backwards goes, though, this is merely scratching the surface. Climb the stairs to the first floor and you’re plunged back into deep time – the 4,600-million-year history of the earth itself, explored through a dazzling collection of rocks and minerals, with skeletal remains of dinosaurs hovering in the background.

The museum is more than just a time capsule, though. The building that houses these treasures is arguably the most significant – and problematic – artefact of all. Although the museum celebrates its bicentenary this year, the current building only opened in 1905. That may not seem, in the grand scheme of things, that long ago – but you only have to look up as you walk through its doors to realise how much has changed since then, for there, high above, hangs a model of a Bristol biplane from 1910. It would have seemed an almost impossible vision of the future five years earlier.

That is one measure of how far we have come in such a short time, but there are many others. Carved in stone above its entrance, an inscription records that the building was ‘the gift of Sir William Henry Wills, Bart to his Fellow Citizens’. The grand hall that lies within looks as though it could have been designed as the trading floor of a great financial institution. Originally it was lined with classical statues which would have made it look even more forbidding. Its left-hand wall is dominated by a vast canvas depicting the Delhi Durbar of 1903, with the British Viceroy leading a procession of Indian Maharajas and British officials on richly decorated elephants. The overwhelming impression is one of unbridled pride in an empire at the top of its game. Hardly surprising, then, that when Edward VII and Queen Alexandra came to Bristol in July 1908 to open Avonmouth’s Royal Edward Dock, it was here that the Lord Mayor laid on a civic lunch for them.

Three years later, when the new king, George V, went hunting tigers out in India, one of those he potted was presented to the museum, where it was stuffed and mounted in an enormous mahogany case and given pride of place amid the museum’s collection of stuffed animals, where it still crouches today.

No one seems to have considered that tobacco, the empire and biggame hunting would one day be things that most people wouldn’t want to celebrate. Bristol – and the world – have moved on, and to say that the museum embodies attitudes and values now regarded as deeply problematic is something of an understatement. While this is an undeniable problem, it also provides an opportunity, which the museum has been proactive in taking up by involving individuals and communities in examining its legacy and seeking ways of addressing it.

In 2020, for example, the museum worked with students from the University of the West of England to create the Uncomfortable Truths podcast, exploring objects in the collection, considering the implications of putting them on display and suggesting ways of recontextualising them. One of the items considered, as a sign below it indicates, was the painting of the Delhi Durbar.

An even more uncompromising challenge to the world view enshrined in the painting faces it from across the hall – a wall drawing created by Jasmine Thompson in 2021. Entitled A Movement not a Moment, it celebrates the Black Lives Matter Movement, showing how people have come together to instigate cultural, political and institutional change not just in Bristol but around the world.

In the centre of the hall, meanwhile, a sign confronts visitors with three blunt statements: ‘The grand Edwardian architecture of this building was designed to celebrate the wealth and power of the city and by reflection its founders. Such ostensibly public-spirited projects masked the deep inequalities in British society and across the Empire. The connection between slavery and this building is an uncomfortable one.’

They are followed by a direct question – ‘How does it make you feel?’ – which not only invites a response but also opens up a dialogue, a dialogue which continues in the Curiosity Gallery. Here, objects are displayed with a range of opinions – not just from experts but also from visitors and others – about the propriety of displaying them and in some cases about issues surrounding their acquisition. This is where you’ll find a Benin bronze head, taken, along with thousands of similar objects, from the royal palace at Benin when it was sacked by British troops in 1897. They subsequently turned up in museums around the world. In recent years, however, calls for their repatriation to Benin, now part of Nigeria, have grown ever more insistent. A few institutions have obliged. Most haven’t, and, while Bristol remains in the latter camp, museum staff are working with the Benin Dialogue Group and the Legacy Restoration Trust in Nigeria to resolve the issue. Elsewhere, objects from a range of periods and cultures are accompanied by views reflecting ongoing dialogues about how and why these objects were collected, and whose histories are being told when they are put on display.

The best-known dialogue instigated by the museum, though, was back in 2009 when Banksy was invited to provide his own spin on the objects displayed therein. Banksy versus Bristol Museum saw its hallowed halls given a playful post-apocalyptic makeover. Statues once again lined the grand hall – although these reimagined classical figures would have had the great and good who greeted Edward VII here a century earlier spluttering into their port. To add insult to injury, the centre of the hall was occupied by a burnt out ice-cream van with a giant ice-cream cone splattered on its roof, while nearby a cop clad in riot gear rocked gently on a child’s fairground horse.

Over 300,000 people visited the exhibition during its ten-week run, with queues over a mile long and some people waiting eight hours to get in. It put the museum on the map, not just in Bristol but internationally. Today, only one sculpture – Angel Bust, or the paint-pot angel – remains to remind us of those heady days. Their legacy, though, survives, not only in the thousands of people who were attracted to the museum for the first time, but also in its ongoing commitment to engage with communities across the city and address the history of the museum with honesty and openness.

Museums are not just about dialogue with the past, though. The spirit of enquiry that led to Bristol’s first museum being established in 1823, and the urge to inspire its visitors not only with ideas but also with beautiful works of art remains undimmed. Bristol Museum & Art Gallery is above all a treasure house of wondrous and beautiful things –and, despite the air of patrician exclusivity bequeathed us by its Edwardian benefactors, it is very much for everyone. n