‘A static collection is a dead collection’: how the British Museum is acquiring for a global public

In March, the Charity Fee signed off on the Sir Percival David Basis’s resolution to present its namesake’s extraordinary assortment of Chinese language treasures—together with a pair of blue-and-white David vases from 1351 and a 1,000-year-old Ru ware bowl stand—to the British Museum. The donation, valued at simply shy of £1bn, broke all data. It has pushed the museum’s Chinese language ceramics holdings to 10,000 items. The fee dominated that it furthers David’s intention that his assortment “inform and encourage folks”.

The British Museum Act 1963 clearly outlines a really slender set of situations below which the museum is permitted, by legislation, to deaccession an merchandise (if it’s a duplicate or printed matter made after 1850 of which the museum holds a good picture; whether it is unfit to stay or too broken to be of use). However fairly what it does purchase—and the way—is an altogether extra fluid proposition. Because the museum’s founding in 1753, its acquisitions, in form and methodology, have altered significantly.

Of the museum’s eight million objects, battle, colonial exploitation and missionary exercise resulted in a major proportion. As we speak, nevertheless, issues come into its possession by way of donations, bequests, purchases and commissions, in addition to excavations and the moveable antiquities scheme. Two notions—the on a regular basis and the ephemeral—underpin what curators search for. “We wish objects that talk and inform a narrative about how folks lived,” says Tom Hockenhull, chair of the Acquisitions Committee and keeper of the Cash and Medals division since 2022. “It’s about exhibiting how issues are reused and recycled and what folks felt about their place in society.”

Any object into consideration has to move a number of sensible and moral checks. First is how it may be safeguarded. As Hockenhull places it, “As soon as an object has arrived, we are able to’t deaccession it, which implies we’ve this stuff till the solar explodes.” So the crew thinks about what it’s manufactured from and below what situations it is going to must be stored—and the attendant value for doing so. Second are the cultural or bequest-led stipulations positioned on its show. If an object is related to a particular group, is claimed group even joyful for it to enter a museum? Whether it is related to a particular panorama, can the museum accommodate it being displayed open air? “We want to consider all these items, as a part of relationship constructing,” Hockenhull says. “We exist to serve the general public, and that public has modified over time.”

As we speak, that public is international. On the alternative finish of the donation spectrum to this 12 months’s £1bn excessive are the each day gives from non-public people. There’s one member of workers on the British Museum amongst whose duties it’s to man an inbox particularly to area these proposals. Day-after-day, folks will write in saying, “I’ve this factor. Would possibly you have an interest?” “And day by day,” says a museum spokesperson, “we’ll write again, saying, ‘No, thanks. We don’t purchase from people.’”

Serendipitous donations

That’s, till they do. “Typically, you’ll have a little bit of backwards and forwards and finally you’ll say, ‘Truly, that is fairly attention-grabbing,’” Hockenhull says. An object would possibly pop up that pertains to a curatorial analysis stream, or that fills a niche or properly enhances one thing already within the museum.

Different occasions, it’s only a nicer instance of one thing the museum already has. As a prolific lender of objects, it’s the establishment’s curiosity to have a couple of of every kind of well-liked issues different establishments are inclined to borrow—from prints (which may solely be proven one 12 months in 10) to Roman imperial busts and Edwardian cash defaced with the suffragette slogan “Votes for Girls”, of the sort the Personal Eye editor Ian Hislop picked out for the I object exhibition he curated in 2018. The annual report for the 12 months ending 31 March 2025 highlighted the latest acquisition, with assist from the JTI Fund for Japanese Acquisitions, of a set of Samurai armour. The museum, in fact, has beforehand celebrated comparable purchases, most notably in 2017. However the alternative to purchase an entire set was not one the Division of Asia might flip down. As Hockenhull highlights, the worth of such a set is that they have been usually assembled over generations, thereby showcasing distinct eras of workmanship. “So we jumped on that,” he says, as a result of a Samurai exhibition is quickly to be introduced.

One other spotlight of the 2024 acquisitions checklist illustrates the museum’s potential to train the nation’s proper to retain works of cultural significance. In July 2024, following an export ban sanctioned by the federal government, the British Museum bought a uncommon Seventeenth-century drawing by Samuel Cooper, Portrait of a Lifeless Youngster, for £114,300 (plus VAT of £4,860), with funds from the Ottley Group and its personal Common Acquisitions Fund.

The museum counts eight departments and lists, together with every keeper (or head of division), near 90 different assistant keepers, heads of part, curators and analysis fellows. In different phrases, quite a lot of extraordinarily knowledgable individuals who would know what to spend cash on. However not all will get to take action.

Buying by way of fieldwork

“A curator of Greek pottery is, in all chance, not going to make many acquisitions throughout their profession, as a result of, for one, we’ve acquired among the finest collections of Greek pottery on this planet—we don’t want extra,” Hockenhull says. In contrast, these departments with a recent focus—the Division of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, say—face numerous thrilling alternatives to work with residing artists and to amass by way of fieldwork. Curators search for methods to report and protect native heritage and crafts practices, as a part of analysis.

“Overwhelmingly, the best energy, by quantity, of our collections is that of the final 200 to 300 years, significantly centered on the final century,” Hockenhull says. This runs the gamut from the wonderful to the mundane: from the nameless donation, in 2024, of the Paris-based Taiwanese artist Anna Hu’s Enchanted White Lily Bangle I (a floral bracelet of gold, brass and silver with a 30.48 carat rubellite gemstone for a pistil) to the Twentieth-century communist currencies (bonds, cash, banknotes, posters and medals) Hockenhull bought in 2017 to fill a niche in his division’s holdings.

Greater than any particular sort of object, the founding precept of the museum—as laid out by Hans Sloane, whose private assortment was the first of the three it began out with—was that its assortment broaden, that it’s a residing factor. “We very a lot function below the ethos {that a} static assortment is a lifeless assortment,” Hockenhull says. “We’re making an attempt to point out the issues that people have made and used because the daybreak of civilisation to the current, which implies we have to hold accumulating.”