History
In 1783, William Hunter bequeathed his substantial and varied collections to the University of Glasgow. (Hunter, writing to Dr William Cullen) They were "to be well and carefully packed up and safely conveyed to Glasgow and delivered to the Principal and Faculty of the College of Glasgow to whom I give and bequeath the same to be kept and preserved by them and their successors for ever... in such sort, way, manner and form as ... shall seem most fit and most conducive to the improvement of the students of the said University of Glasgow."
The museum first opened in 1807, in a specially constructed building off the High Street, adjoining the original campus of the University. When the University moved west to its new site at Gilmorehill (to escape crowding and pollution in the city centre) the museum moved too. In 1870, the Hunterian collections were transferred to the University’s present site and assigned halls in Sir George Gilbert Scott's neo-Gothic building.
At first the entire collection was housed together, and displayed in the packed conditions common in museums of that time, but significant sections were later moved away to other parts of the University. The Zoological collections are now housed within the Graham Kerr Building, the art collections in the Hunterian Art Gallery, and Hunter's library containing some 10,000 printed books and 650 manuscripts, finally received in 1807, in Glasgow University Library. Hunter’s anatomical collections are housed in the Allen Thomson Building, and his pathological preparations at the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow
The money to build the museum, and the core of its original collections, came from the bequest of the Scottish anatomist and scientist William Hunter, who died in London in 1783. As well as his medical collections, which arose from his own work, Hunter collected very widely, often assisted by his many royal and aristocratic patrons. He and his agents scoured Europe for coins, minerals, paintings and prints, ethnographic materials, books and manuscripts, as well as insects and other biological specimens. Hunter's eclectic bequest forms the core of the collections, but since Hunter's death, they have grown considerably, and now include some of the most important collections of work by artists such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and James McNeill Whistler, as well as superb geological, zoological, anatomical, archaeological, ethnographic and scientific instrument collections.
The Hunterian Museum re-opened in September 2011 featuring a new permanent gallery devoted to the Romans in Scotland and new opening hours of 10:00-5:00 Tuesday to Saturday, 11:00-4:00 Sundays and closed Monday.
Read more about this topic: Hunterian Museum And Art Gallery
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)