A Brill Calendar: April 16

Hans Sloane's Worldly Treasures

Few of the institutions that preserve our cultural heritages have statesmen to thank for their birth and development.

‘Culture’ - meaning (in its least pedantic sense) ‘everything people create together’ - isn’t created in a shielded, endorsed and recognized Cultural Palace. It results from within a group, regardless of size: a single family, village, city, or region. Unfailingly, it starts in individuals interesting next-of-kin and friends in new pursuits.

A fine example is the ‘British Museum’, opened to the public for the first time in 1759. There is a feeling that so noble an institution must have been created by the State. Yet, it may be argued that an event happening on April 16 1660, in Killyleagh Town, County Down, Ireland, was the necessary condition for the birth of one of the world’s earliest and most influential museums. On that day, Hans Sloane was born there: embarking on a very long life of almost 93 years. Professionally, it was an extremely successful one: Sloane became a knowledgeable naturalist & physician, with King George II as his patient; and had been knighted already as the country’s first general practitioner when he became President of the Royal Society in 1727.

By then he had found the true joy of his life: collecting rare and beautiful things. The collection increased not only by purchasing individual objects, but also wholesale: by buying up entire collections at auction. But even in an era of wealthy men, basking in the sun of an expanding European awareness of the globe, replete with new species of plants, people, products and profits, it is seldom to be as lucky as Hans Sloane was to be able to purchase an entire Cabinet of Curiosities of a famous connoisseur preceding him: namely one William Courten (1642 – 1702), descendant of a mercantile ship-owning family, who arrived from Holland as Protestant refugees in 1568 in London, at the start of the Dutch Eighty-years War against Habsburg Spain.

If Hans Sloane – before he died on January 11, 1753 – wouldn’t have bequeathed his worldly treasures to the Nation – on the condition his heirs would be paid 20.000 Pounds Sterling – the Museum couldn’t have been opened possibly to a discriminating public six years later.