Oops!
Last week a visitor to a Cambridge museum accidentally smashed three Qing dynasty vases. Careless? Wait till you hear about the fate of the Tosseli Ceramic Locomotive. Report by Laura Barton
Tuesday January 31, 2006
The Guardian
Accidents, famously, do happen. Alas this adage cannot serve to soften the blow inflicted by the events at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge last Wednesday lunchtime, when a gentleman tripped upon his shoelaces, tumbled down a set of stairs and crashed into a set of three, 300-year-old Chinese vases, which had sat happily undisturbed on a windowsill at the bottom of the staircase for a good 40 years. The ornamental vases hailed from the Qing Dynasty, reign of Kangxi (1662-1722BC), and were painted in enamels in the famille verte palette with traces of gilding. They were quite, quite beautiful. Dusting himself off, the gentleman appeared unharmed; the vases, meanwhile, which have been described as "priceless", were smashed to smithereens. "There it is!" the man is said to have cried, pointing at the offending shoelace. "That's the culprit!"
But the Fitzwilliam Smasher and his Culpable Shoelace is not a unique tale of curatorial woe. The institutions charged with safeguarding the nation's most precious artefacts and antiquities do, on occasion, fall victim to catastrophe, over-zealous cleaning, acts of God, and the occasional magpie-ish visitor. Incidents on the scale of last Wednesday's debacle, however, are rare, and yesterday, during a brief survey of some of the UK's 2,500 museums, the mere mention of the words "Fitzwilliam" and "vases" prompted sharp intakes of breath and more than a few mutterings of "Thank God it wasn't me." Nevertheless, many do have their own stories to tell, the pain now somewhat dampened by the intervening years.
The British Museum, for example, is still smarting from the case of the Portland vase, a violet-blue Roman glass urn found in the tomb of Emperor Alexander Severus, deliberately vandalised and shattered to pieces by a ruffian in 1845, but so impeccably restored that it is impossible to tell. Meanwhile, secret papers released under the Freedom of Information Act revealed how two schoolboys once damaged one of the disputed Parthenon marbles figures when they began fighting in the British Museum in 1961. Apparently one of the boys fell and knocked off part of a centaur's leg. "Today everything is secure," says a jovial spokesperson. "Everything is in a position where it can't be harmed."
"Touch wood, nothing often goes missing or gets broken," says a spokesperson for St Fagans National History Museum, which is the most popular heritage attraction in Wales. "More often they want our plasma screens, they don't want the old stuff," she laughs, "you can't sell it down the pub." In fact the last time anything was half-inched it was candlesticks which were so unusual-looking that the police found them exceedingly quickly. "And we did once have a cleaner smash a Clarice Cliffe bowl," she says, dredging her memory. "I don't know if it was mendable. But it certainly hasn't been on display for a while."
Eyebrows have, of course, been raised at the fact that the Fitzwilliam vases were left on open display. Many valuable museum pieces are protected by glass cases, or are roped off to keep them away from the sticky, meddling fingers of the general public. At the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, a spokesperson explains that "the displays are so close together a visitor's not going to pick up a lot of momentum". Over at the Beatles Story in Liverpool, home to John Lennon's trademark glasses and George Harrison's first ever guitar, they have employed extra levels of protection for particularly vulnerable items: before being sold to George Michael, the piano upon which Lennon wrote Imagine sat in the museum for three years. "A stipulation of the insurance," explains the museum press officer, "was to have bulletproof glass and a security guard present at all times."
Gloria Juniper, secretary at the Oriental Museum, notes that they too have a lot of Chinese ceramics. "But they're all in glass cases," she says calmly, and though she doesn't say so, we both know that she might well have added the words, "not on windowsills." Indeed the majority of artefacts at the Oriental are nestled in glass cases. "There have been the odd pieces out on display where my heart's been in my mouth," she says. "But the only thing I can recall being broken was by a photographer. It was similar to a Tang horse, but it was a polo player."
The Fitzwilliam has announced its intention to restore the smashed vases, and perhaps they might take heart from the tale of the Oriental Museum's polo-playing Tang horse, which is now happily back on display. "That went to a restorer," says Juniper, "but it was quite an expensive exercise for us, because we don't have much of a budget. The collections are insured of course, but it's such a huge collection, no one knows all the up-to-date values."
"There is a whole bizarre history of incidents that go on through the years, which are really traumatic at the time," says Edward Bramah of Bramah's Tea and Coffee Museum in London. The most notable incident involved a Toselli Ceramic Cafetiere Locomotive, from about 1862, and which boasted special carriages to chug along sugar, chocolates and spoons behind. It was used on the book jacket of Bramah's 1972 book Tea and Coffee, and when, 30 years later, the piece came up for sale in London the museum was delighted to make a successful bid of around £4,000. "Only to be told a few days later by the auctioneers that the locomotive had rolled off the shelf and was broken," sighs Bramah. "Happily it was beautifully restored, and the auctioneers' insurance covered it. Fortuitously."
At the Museum of Antiquities, which safeguards the famous Roman coin from the River Tyne with the Emperor Hadrian on one side and the imperial barge on the other, the main concern is for Hadrian's Wall itself, "Which," says Lindsay Allason-Jones, the director of archaeological museums, "is a much bigger artefact, but in many ways much more delicate than many of those in the museum." Over the years a couple of items have gone walkabout "two brooches", she recalls, "when there were workmen in ... but we got them back."
These days, visitors are also requested to leave backpacks at the front desk, to prevent them from banging into or scratching any of the items on display. "There were a couple of near-misses," Allason-Jones says darkly. "But other than that nothing has left me white of gills." This is not to say there have not been minor incidents of course. "We have had children trying to add to the inscriptions on Roman altars with a pencil," she sighs. "It has happened a couple of times, I usually write a curt letter to the school teacher. We've managed to clean it off, but it is expensive, yes."
But what has protected the Museum of Antiquities more than anything is perhaps a simple rule of thumb: "We don't have anything balanced precariously," says Allason-Jones. "Most children are very careful; most adolescents don't have any control over their limbs." And of the Fitzwilliam Museum catastrophe? "Hmm," she breathes lightly. "That's what you get if you leave vases on a window ledge".
guardian.co.uk
Last week a visitor to a Cambridge museum accidentally smashed three Qing dynasty vases. Careless? Wait till you hear about the fate of the Tosseli Ceramic Locomotive. Report by Laura Barton
Tuesday January 31, 2006
The Guardian
Accidents, famously, do happen. Alas this adage cannot serve to soften the blow inflicted by the events at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge last Wednesday lunchtime, when a gentleman tripped upon his shoelaces, tumbled down a set of stairs and crashed into a set of three, 300-year-old Chinese vases, which had sat happily undisturbed on a windowsill at the bottom of the staircase for a good 40 years. The ornamental vases hailed from the Qing Dynasty, reign of Kangxi (1662-1722BC), and were painted in enamels in the famille verte palette with traces of gilding. They were quite, quite beautiful. Dusting himself off, the gentleman appeared unharmed; the vases, meanwhile, which have been described as "priceless", were smashed to smithereens. "There it is!" the man is said to have cried, pointing at the offending shoelace. "That's the culprit!"
But the Fitzwilliam Smasher and his Culpable Shoelace is not a unique tale of curatorial woe. The institutions charged with safeguarding the nation's most precious artefacts and antiquities do, on occasion, fall victim to catastrophe, over-zealous cleaning, acts of God, and the occasional magpie-ish visitor. Incidents on the scale of last Wednesday's debacle, however, are rare, and yesterday, during a brief survey of some of the UK's 2,500 museums, the mere mention of the words "Fitzwilliam" and "vases" prompted sharp intakes of breath and more than a few mutterings of "Thank God it wasn't me." Nevertheless, many do have their own stories to tell, the pain now somewhat dampened by the intervening years.
The British Museum, for example, is still smarting from the case of the Portland vase, a violet-blue Roman glass urn found in the tomb of Emperor Alexander Severus, deliberately vandalised and shattered to pieces by a ruffian in 1845, but so impeccably restored that it is impossible to tell. Meanwhile, secret papers released under the Freedom of Information Act revealed how two schoolboys once damaged one of the disputed Parthenon marbles figures when they began fighting in the British Museum in 1961. Apparently one of the boys fell and knocked off part of a centaur's leg. "Today everything is secure," says a jovial spokesperson. "Everything is in a position where it can't be harmed."
"Touch wood, nothing often goes missing or gets broken," says a spokesperson for St Fagans National History Museum, which is the most popular heritage attraction in Wales. "More often they want our plasma screens, they don't want the old stuff," she laughs, "you can't sell it down the pub." In fact the last time anything was half-inched it was candlesticks which were so unusual-looking that the police found them exceedingly quickly. "And we did once have a cleaner smash a Clarice Cliffe bowl," she says, dredging her memory. "I don't know if it was mendable. But it certainly hasn't been on display for a while."
Eyebrows have, of course, been raised at the fact that the Fitzwilliam vases were left on open display. Many valuable museum pieces are protected by glass cases, or are roped off to keep them away from the sticky, meddling fingers of the general public. At the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, a spokesperson explains that "the displays are so close together a visitor's not going to pick up a lot of momentum". Over at the Beatles Story in Liverpool, home to John Lennon's trademark glasses and George Harrison's first ever guitar, they have employed extra levels of protection for particularly vulnerable items: before being sold to George Michael, the piano upon which Lennon wrote Imagine sat in the museum for three years. "A stipulation of the insurance," explains the museum press officer, "was to have bulletproof glass and a security guard present at all times."
Gloria Juniper, secretary at the Oriental Museum, notes that they too have a lot of Chinese ceramics. "But they're all in glass cases," she says calmly, and though she doesn't say so, we both know that she might well have added the words, "not on windowsills." Indeed the majority of artefacts at the Oriental are nestled in glass cases. "There have been the odd pieces out on display where my heart's been in my mouth," she says. "But the only thing I can recall being broken was by a photographer. It was similar to a Tang horse, but it was a polo player."
The Fitzwilliam has announced its intention to restore the smashed vases, and perhaps they might take heart from the tale of the Oriental Museum's polo-playing Tang horse, which is now happily back on display. "That went to a restorer," says Juniper, "but it was quite an expensive exercise for us, because we don't have much of a budget. The collections are insured of course, but it's such a huge collection, no one knows all the up-to-date values."
"There is a whole bizarre history of incidents that go on through the years, which are really traumatic at the time," says Edward Bramah of Bramah's Tea and Coffee Museum in London. The most notable incident involved a Toselli Ceramic Cafetiere Locomotive, from about 1862, and which boasted special carriages to chug along sugar, chocolates and spoons behind. It was used on the book jacket of Bramah's 1972 book Tea and Coffee, and when, 30 years later, the piece came up for sale in London the museum was delighted to make a successful bid of around £4,000. "Only to be told a few days later by the auctioneers that the locomotive had rolled off the shelf and was broken," sighs Bramah. "Happily it was beautifully restored, and the auctioneers' insurance covered it. Fortuitously."
At the Museum of Antiquities, which safeguards the famous Roman coin from the River Tyne with the Emperor Hadrian on one side and the imperial barge on the other, the main concern is for Hadrian's Wall itself, "Which," says Lindsay Allason-Jones, the director of archaeological museums, "is a much bigger artefact, but in many ways much more delicate than many of those in the museum." Over the years a couple of items have gone walkabout "two brooches", she recalls, "when there were workmen in ... but we got them back."
These days, visitors are also requested to leave backpacks at the front desk, to prevent them from banging into or scratching any of the items on display. "There were a couple of near-misses," Allason-Jones says darkly. "But other than that nothing has left me white of gills." This is not to say there have not been minor incidents of course. "We have had children trying to add to the inscriptions on Roman altars with a pencil," she sighs. "It has happened a couple of times, I usually write a curt letter to the school teacher. We've managed to clean it off, but it is expensive, yes."
But what has protected the Museum of Antiquities more than anything is perhaps a simple rule of thumb: "We don't have anything balanced precariously," says Allason-Jones. "Most children are very careful; most adolescents don't have any control over their limbs." And of the Fitzwilliam Museum catastrophe? "Hmm," she breathes lightly. "That's what you get if you leave vases on a window ledge".
guardian.co.uk