Making ready ‘a fit and commodious house’

In June 1798, the matter of a museum building at the College in Glasgow was delegated by the Faculty to the ‘Summer Committee’ who were ‘to examine particularly all the different situations in and about the College, that in their opinion, might answer for the Hunterian Museum, and to examine the latter will of Doctor Hunter to see how far any particular situation is suggested for the same.’ In October 1799 Matthew Hunter Baillie emphasised to the Faculty that the Museum should be a ‘distinct building’ and placed in ‘a conspicuous situation’. Perhaps Baillie had got wind of a plan to include the Museum in a comprehensive redevelopment of the east wing of the inner quadrangle, this to include a new Common Hall and classrooms. Indeed some professors felt that placing the Museum in the garden would mar its tranquillity. At first the former option seemed likely to win out, but it was eventually voted down, and Matthew Baillie was informed by letter in December 1800 of a decision in favour of the garden (Figure 4.1).

In the event, the College did not have to wait the full thirty years to obtain the use of the collection. William Cruikshank, one of the beneficiaries of William's forethought on this matter, died in 1800, by which time Matthew Hunter Baillie had already given up the teaching of anatomy, and other anatomical specimens were available to their successors at Great Windmill Street.

The move to Gilmorehill in i870: demolition and survival

For some decades a move by the University to larger premises had been under considération, in the light of the deterioration of the mass of the seventeenth-century buildings, ever-growing student numbers, the need for improved teaching facilities, and increasing industrialisation of that part of central Glasgow (Figure 6.1). Respectable citizens had already moved westwards to new suburbs.

Pollution had a marked effect on the buildings including the Museum (see p. 78), as well as on trees in the College grounds.

A site at Gilmorehill, on the western outskirts of the city, was finally agreed on, and the existing College buildings sold to a railway company. Extensive new premises, in a neo-Gothic style with Scottish baronial overtones, designed by leading London architect, Sir George Gilbert Scott, rose on a hilltop overlooking a bend in the River Kelvin (Figure 6.2). The Hunterian Museum, a structure very much more modern than almost all of the existing College buildings, was also abandoned to the railway company, and the collections transferred to halls and galleries within the new complex.

A new direction, 1975–90

The retirement in 1975 of Anne Robertson (who had been awarded a personal professorship in recognition of her life's work in 1974), coupled as it was with the impending inauguration of the new Hunterian Art Gallery (see p. 110), afforded to the University Court an opportunity for a comprehensive reassessment of staff structure. Court resolved to unite the various sections (Archaeology, Numismatics, Geology, Zoology, Anatomy and Fine Art) under a Director. Staff would in future be responsible to him or her, their appointments being to the Museum (and Art Gallery) specifically. The various assistant curators, recently re-designated assistant keepers, and the technical staff were to report to him. The assistant curators in Geology, originally appointed jointly to the Museum and to the Department of Geology as lecturers, were to have an agreed maximum teaching load, in recognition of past associations. All other curators were placed on the ‘other related’ pay-scale, broadly similar to academic scales. Warding staff, hitherto responsible to the University's Bedellus (head porter), were eventually taken under the umbrella of the Director, and soon provided with distinctive uniforms. The Museum Committee was reconstituted as the Museums and Gallery Committee, and its membership enlarged to encompass appropriate members of other academic departments. The honorary curators (now honorary keepers) continued in post, and were ex-officio members of the Museums Committee, to which the Director reported, but they exercised no day-to-day oversight of activities.

Growth of the art collections: Whistler and Mackintosh

Paintings and prints had constituted a minor element in William Hunter's overall collections (see p. 21). However, from our presentday perspective we can in particular applaud his acquisition of three outstanding paintings by his contemporary J. B. S. Chardin, together with Rembrandt's Entombment, Philips Koninck's Landscape in Holland, three animal paintings by George Stubbs, together with his own portrait commissioned from Allan Ramsay. In 1807 the Hunterian pictures were placed in the new Museum's Picture Gallery (see p. 59), and in other locations within the building. The College itself continued to display pictures, particularly of its own rectors, principals, professors, benefactors and other luminaries, in various public rooms, for example in the Fore Hall, in classrooms and (later) in departments, a practice which continues to this day.

In 1870 the Hunterian paintings and prints were transferred to Gilmorehill, and displayed either in the Library or in the adjacent Anteroom, in conditions of increased congestion, hung from floor to ceiling, after the fashion of the time. Though at first we hear little about them, their conservation needs were not ignored, and repairs and reframing took place at intervals. A report commissioned in 1931–2 from Stanley Cursiter, then Director of the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, provides a useful digest of the location of individual paintings which were split between the Library and the ‘Hunterian Parlour’ [the Ante-room]; he had the use of a stepladder to examine them.

‘Collecting in the largest sense of the word’

This was an era of expansive collecting, and acquisitiveness, both by individuáis and by institutions such as the Royal Society. The enormous holdings accumulated in London by the physician Sir Hans Sloane covered subject areas represented, though on a smaller scale, in William's museum; they were to form the basis of the British Museum, founded in 1753. King George III and his wife, Queen Charlotte, collected widely in many fields, including the decorative arts. Many others, including medical men such as Richard Mead, were active collectors. Some made their museums accessible to the public, for an admission fee.

William began to accumulate anatomical preparations at an early stage in his teaching career in London. Already, in 1742, he had acquired Dr James Douglas' anatomical preparations when the latter died. In 1754–5, at the sale of the collection of Dr Richard Mead, he bought numerous books, some paintings of famous medical predecessors, and an Egyptian mummy which cost him 13 guineas.

After he moved to Great Windmill Street in 1767 William diversified his collecting activities, adding fossils and minerals, more paintings and, from around 1770, coins and medals, the latter at first for pleasure. ‘At the moment I am sinking money so fast’, he wrote to Cullen in 1768, ‘that I am rather embarrassed. I am now collecting in the largest sense of the word.’

William Hunter's principal aim in bequeathing his collection in 1783 had not been to provide the College at Glasgow with a museum, but to install a teaching resource as a stimulus to the medical curriculum, for which many of its sections were admirably suited. William made no specific statement in his will on how he expected individual parts of the collections to serve subsequent generations, but in the main he surely imagined their deployment as at Great Windmill Street, the anatomical and pathological specimens aiding the work of medical students, with the remainder assisting scholarly researchers, as they had during his lifetime (Figure 10.1). In general, this was how events turned out, though the Glasgow Trustees imposed increasingly restrictive conditions on who had access to what. Many of the sections, principally the coins and books, were felt over long periods to lack any educational value (see p. 90).

The Museum was at first received at the College with enthusiasm, but with the passage of time, and the death or retirement of the first generation of trustees, it came to be seen as an incubus, a drain on often straitened financial resources. There is a clear impression of stagnation by the mid-nineteenth century. After its seeming incarceration from 1870 in the new Gilmorehill complex, the Museum ceased to be a regular feature of travellers' accounts and from 1901 it was eclipsed by the competing attractions of the nearby Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery (see below).

Within each subject area, catalogues are ordered chronologically. Those publications marked with an asterisk (*) catalogue Hunterian material along with other collections. Some titles, cited in the Notes, are repeated in the Bibliography (see p. 166) for ease of reference. Numerous artworks and archaeological specimens have also been described in catalogues of temporary exhibitions and in published excavation reports over many decades.

Anatomy and Pathology

Fordyce, G., D. Pitcairn and W. Combe [sic] (1840), Catalogue of the Anatomica! Preparations in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow.

Teacher, J. H. (1900), Catalogue of the Anatomica! and Pathological Preparations of Dr William Hunter in the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, 2 vols, Glasgow.

*Cleland, J. (1909), Catalogue of Crania in the Museum of the Anatomica! Department of the University ofGlasgow, Glasgow.

Marshall, A. J. and J. A. G. Burton (1962), Catalogue of the Pathological Preparations ofDr William Hunter [and others] in the Museum of the Pathology Department, Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Glasgow.

Marshall, A. J. (1970), Catalogue of the Anatomica! Preparations of Dr William Hunter in the Museum ofthe Anatomy Department, from the original Catalogue prepared by Professor John Teacher, Glasgow.

Archaeology

University of Glasgow (1768; enlarged edn 1792), Monumenta Imperii Romani, Glasgow.

Macdonald, J. (1897), Tituli Hunteriani: an account of the Roman Stones in the Hunterian Museum, University ofGlasgow, Glasgow.

*Keppie, L. J. F. and B. J. Arnold (1984), Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani (Corpus of Sculpture ofthe Roman World), Great Britain, vol. 1, fasc. 4: Scotland, London.

McDowell, A. G. (1993), Hieratic Ostraca in the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, Oxford.

The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow, established in 1807, houses the oldest collection anywhere in Scotland, which has been continuously available to the viewing public, under the same ownership and governing body, until the present day. Bequeathed to the University in 1783by the distinguished physician and anatomist William Hunter, a former student, the Museum was first housed in a handsome classical building, regrettably demolished in 1870 when the University removed to its present location in the city's West End. The Museum was then assigned halls in Sir George Gilbert Scott's neo-Gothic university buildings on Gilmorehill. In subsequent decades parts of the collection were gradually dispersed, in the laudable interests of teaching and to alleviate overcrowding, to the University departments of Zoology, Anatomy and Pathology, the latter based at the city's Royal Infirmary. The Hunterian books and manuscripts migrated to a new University Library in the late 1960s. A purpose-built Hunterian Art Gallery, opened in 1980, now houses William Hunter's paintings and prints together with many later additions.

Any historian of William Hunter and the museum which bears his name has at his disposal a wide range of both primary and secondary sources. In the first instance letters and correspondence in the hand of William (as I shall henceforth call him) are available, many of them held at Glasgow University Library or the Royal College of Surgeons of England, Lincoln's Inn Fields, London.