part of APPENDIX F

London, Great Britain

Horniman Museum and Library

100 London Road,
Forest Hill,
London, SE23 3PQ
England

Tel: +44 20 8699 1872

http://www.horniman.ac.uk/index.cfm

The Victorian tea trader, Frederick John Horniman, collected specimens and artefacts from around the World from the 1860s onwards. He opened part of his family house to the public so show the riches he had collected but the collection soon outgrew the family home and in 1898 he commissioned a new building to house a new Museum.

The Museum opened in 1901 and was dedicated with the surrounding land as a gift to the people of London. The original collections comprised natural history specimens, cultural artefacts and musical instruments. Over the last 100 years the Museum has added significantly to the original bequest with Horniman's original collections comprising only 10% of current ethnography and musical instrument holdings.

Further buildings were added to the original during the course of the last century notably in 1911 when a new building was donated by Frederick's son Emslie. In 1999 the Museum demolished some of the later additions and embarked on a Centenary Development to create a new extension and several associated spaces. This new development opened on 14 June 2002.

The Museum holds in total some 350,000 objects. There three main collections, World Cultures (Ethnography) comprising 80,000 objects, Natural History with 250,000 specimens, and Music with over 7,000 instruments plus 1,000 archive documents. There is also a parallel education handling collection which has over 3,700 objects drawn from all three main disciplines and a library collection with texts and related items covering the main collection areas.

Most objects not currently on display are held in storage at the Museum's Study Collection Centre in Greenwich, while the Museum also loans objects to other institutions for exhibitions.

The Asian collections consist of approximately 32,000 items and are particularly rich in art, including carvings of gods, masks and puppets, and other items of material culture from India, China, Japan, Sri Lanka and Burma. Many of the Indian and Japanese objects were part of Frederic Horniman's original collection and include important examples of stone sculpture (depicting, for example, Hanuman, Ganesha, and Jain figures), ritual objects and Japanese, Chinese and Indian costumes. The collections also contain architectural pieces such as archways and doors from India.

Many of the objects within the Asian collection were acquired through purchase by Frederick or John Emslie Horniman from international exhibitions such as the Great Exhibition (1851), the India and Colonial Exhibition (1886), the Vienna Exhibition (1889) and the Anglo-Japanese Exhibition (1910). They also purchased objects in the course of their world travels, while others came through dealers and auction houses or with the assistance of agents and acquaintances. The collections have been further increased in the 20th Century through systematic field collecting carried out by curators and other anthropologists. Notable groups are the Andaman, Maldive, Borneo and Naga collections.

The Horniman Museum's Andamanes collection consists of a number of objects (the Protheroe collection) acquired 1908 plus a few items from A.R. Radcliffe-Brown.

No list of Andamanese items held by the Horniman Museum is available. 

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Last changed 6 December 2003