evaded, side-stepped or simply not noticed raises different questions which, important though
they are, I have not addressed here.”23
Yet this was largely drowned out by the impact his subsequent claims about those
“advocates, designers, directors and managers” had.
In every study of the history of collections and museums it is nigh-on impossible, however, to
pay full justice to the public’s constitutive role. The main reason is the availability of source
material - or rather the lack thereof. It is far easier to collect evidence to throw some light on
the intentions of those designing exhibitions or assembling a collection than it is to find any
indication as to what impression the display of a collection made on its audience, certainly the
further back one goes in the 19* century. In most cases it is even difficult to obtain as much as
an estimate of how many visitors attended an exhibition. And not only are sources scarce, but
until recently they have also been extremely difficult to locate. It is only with the advent of
the digitisation of source material such as public newspapers that a full-scale systematic
analysis of such archival material has become conceivable.
As a result of this first difficulty, the danger of projecting contemporary ideas concerning the
role and function of exhibitions and museums back in history again crops up - this is actually
the second major caveat. It may seem superfluous to mention this yet again given that one of
the ideas underlying the “narrative interpretation” of exhibitions is to deconstruct - in Jacques
Derrida’s sense of the word - the museum, but it remains one of the major pitfalls of any
history of any collection. More specifically, it can be not only tempting to assume that there is
some sort of natural predisposition to create large-scale, institutionalised, and entertaining
exhibitions, but it can also be very difficult not to succumb to this temptation, even if only
subconsciously, for the simple reason that the more recent situation is the most familiar, and
because the further an exhibition lies in the past, the less concrete evidence about it is usually
available, and the more one has to start speculating in one’s own terms. There is, in other
words, an acute danger of becoming “Whiggish”, which is not eliminated by analysing
museums in Foucauldian terms.
What’s more, the danger of analysing past exhibitions in contemporary terms is particularly
acute whenever one is dealing with a collection that straddles the pre-modem and the modem
periods in history. Most of the studies mentioned above focus on the modem period. Again,
this is not intended as criticism, and it does also not mean that many of the ideas propounded
by the authors mentioned above don’t bear relevance to the study of collections from the premodem
period ( - one could in fact argue that the distinction between these two periods has
become so pronounced and seemingly ever-prevalent amongst historians that it has ceased to
be a helpful and become stifling in the sense that far too little attention is being paid to the
continuities between these two eras); but at the same time one does have to be aware of the
fact that even though these authors’ methodology and premises are applicable in other phases
of history, many of the conclusions derived from them need not be.
23 Bennett, The Birth o f the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, 11.
One particularly important point concerns the definition and role of the public in the early
modem and the modem period. In a nutshell, there was no “bourgeoisie in the early modem
period. Given the role Bennett for instance assigns museums as sites that helped define this
bourgeoisie and delineate it from other social groups, one can see how museums in the
Bennettian sense could not exist before the 19th century, even if it is perfectly possible that
exhibitions have always carried political messages throughout history already.
This is all particularly relevant to any study of the history of Teylers Museum because it was
conceived towards the very end of the pre-modem period, which, as a rule of thumb, is taken
to end with the French Revolution of 1789. The fact that Teylers Museum was not created as
a purely modem institution goes a long way towards explaining some of the characteristics
that seemed to constitute increasingly puzzling facets of this “museum”, such as the fact that
it housed both scientific collections and a collection of fine art, or the design of its building.
Notwithstanding its lavish and costly decoration, the Oval Room was not conceived primarily
for the display of a collection, but far more as a site where collections could be stored and -
above all else -Bstudied. Yet later additions to the building clearly reflect the changing
concept as to what function “museums” were to fulfil. The best example at Teylers is
provided by the wing that was added between 1878 and 1885, i.e. precisely at the tune the
electrostatic generator was sent to Paris. This new annex for instance provided the museum
with a new entrance that was far more prominent than its previous one, in a clear sign that the
“general public” was now being embraced. By this time, the museum had also acquired a
reputation as an art museum, and was less known for its scientific collections. By and large,
the scientific research funded by the Foundation was now conducted in an adjacent
laboratory.
One of the most interesting questions with regard to the history of Teylers Museum is
therefore how much of an impact its 18th century, early-modem roots had on the institution’s
19th century development, its role within society, and its perception by outsiders. This, in turn,
is particularly relevant in trying to understand the role of the museum’s scientific instrument
collection. As was already mentioned above, by and large the first “museums’ in the sense of
the “invented museums” of the 19th century were art museums. To rephrase this, those
institutions called “museums” that came to determine the connotations the term “museum”
carried by the end of the 19th century were - generally speaking - art museums.
Expressed metaphorically, the scientific instmment collection at Teylers Museum therefore
effectively found itself in a kind of force field, which was in turn determined largely by two
fluctuating gravitational poles; on the one hand, it formed part of a public museum that — in its
architectural form at least — began to resemble the stereotypical Bennettian museum aiming
to attract bourgeois visitors; on the other hand, it clearly betrayed the 18 century roots of this
museum, in that it was primarily intended for research — the Paris Electrical Exhibition is one
of the first examples of an instrument from the museum’s collection being presented to a large
audience on the basis of its historical value.
24 On the history and evolution o f public art museums see: Kristina Kratz-Kessemeier, Andrea Meyer, and
Benedicte Savoy, eds., Museumsgeschichte: Kommentierte Quellentexte 1750-1950 (Berlin: Reimer, 2010).