Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax … or Prints and Clocks and Typewriters

When the V&A opened it’s Medieval and Renaissance Galleries (one of my favourite places) in 2010, Brian Sewell complained in his review for the Evening Standard that the new displays contained little art and only ‘whimsical curatorial bundlings of shoes and ships and sealing wax.’ I thought then that he seemed to be missing the point, that the galleries are trying to show the range of life in the medieval and renaissance periods, as well as the breadth of the V&A collections, which ‘shoes and ships and sealing wax’ precisely do. I thought of this again last weekend when visiting Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science.

Their new exhibition ‘Eccentricity: Unexpected Objects and Irregular Behaviour’ does everything that Brian Sewell missed. They have taken the opportunity to showcase the more ‘whimsical’ pieces in the MHS collections, showing the eccentricity of patterns of museum collecting as well as of the history of science and the objects associated with it. It’s a wonderful little exhibition, mixing well-known and obscure figures in cases which are as eccentrically organised as the objects. Some focus on an eccentric person like Charles Daubeny, some on an irregular group of objects in the museum’s collections, like typewriters, including a Chinese one. Alongside this run representations of ‘mad’ scientists, including my own favourite Hogarth’s ‘longitude lunatic.’

The interpretation is also nicely self-reflexive, showing the processes by which odd objects joined the collections and why these wouldn’t normally be displayed, as well as how the exhibition was put together. It draws visitors out into the permanent displays into different stories and questions, and gets you thinking about the status of objects in and outside museum collections. It creates a world which Alice would definitely have enjoyed, even if there are no actual shoes, ships or sealing wax.