2.

From Empire to Independence: The Ethnographic Collections of

the National Museum of Ireland

The artefacts of non‐European ethnography held by the National Museum of Ireland have
been seen variously as curios, souvenirs and bloody war loot during the 250 years since
their collection. This paper aims to explore the multiple histories of the ethnographic
material and how the development of the Museum and its changing priorities have
influenced the acquisition and display of these objects.1

The Museum of Science and Art, Dublin, later the National Museum of Ireland, was
established in 1877 by the Science and Art Museum Act and operated under the umbrella of
the South Kensington Science and Art Department. As part of the Act, the varied object
collections of established private societies such as the Royal Dublin Society were transferred
to state ownership. The Museum immediately began actively to acquire new material
through purchase, donation and loans, as well as by the transfer of material and casts from
its sister museums in Edinburgh and London. Ethnographic material from overseas was
eagerly collected during the early years of the Museum, but gradually the focus began to
shift towards Irish material culture.

Today the ethnographic collections of the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) are part of the
Irish Antiquities Division and number approximately 11,000 objects, with material from
Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific.2 Irish ethnographic material is categorised
separately as Irish folklife, while European material is generally classified as archaeological
or decorative art and therefore distinct from the ethnography of other continents. The
classic colonial division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ continues to be the rationale behind the
classifications of the Museum’s Ethnographic Collection. The majority of the collections
were acquired during the heyday of the British Empire, between 1860 and 1914. Pacific and
North American material forms the highlights of the collections, with smaller groups of
important objects from Africa. The varied background to the acquisition of this material by
individuals, travellers and servicemen meant that its collection was rarely systematic and
thus the material is uneven and non‐representative, as is the case in most museums with
historic collections.

Donors to Dublin institutions such as the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) were part of a wider
network of individuals and museums in Ireland and Britain, often reflecting personal
connections and shared experiences of empire.3 Sometimes, however, these links are less
than obvious. The RDS acquired weapons and ornaments from Lieutenant John Hutchison,
collected during the Pacific surveys of HMS Herald in the early 1850s. Hutchison has no
immediate Irish connections, and the British Museum, amongst others, also holds material
from the Herald’s voyage. After 1877 the new Museum also acquired material that was part
of wider European acquisition and dispersal systems. Benin material was scattered
throughout the museums of Europe from salerooms such as Webster’s, while material
collected by Irish colonial officer Arthur Mahaffy also found its way to the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford, and the Victoria Museum, Australia. The bulk of Alfred Haddon’s 1888
Torres Strait expedition material went to the British Museum, but similar examples were
also acquired by Dublin, with a few pieces going to the Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology, Cambridge.4

The Anglo‐Irish or Ascendancy (predominantly Church of Ireland) background of the RDS’s

members is highlighted by a small collection of raffia mats from Madagascar.5 These were
collected by the London Missionary Society (LMS) member and author Revd William Ellis,
and given to the RDS c. 1868. The Protestant LMS actively collected material and publicly
exhibited objects such as ‘the family idols of Pomare’ as trophies of success, reconstituted
as tangible evidence of the repudiation of pagan deities (Thomas 1991, 155). The Jesuits
also collected on a small scale, based on a similar educational purpose to that of the LMS,
but Catholic missionary activity also often encouraged the destruction of so‐called idols and
instead assisted in the manufacture of goods for sale, fusing indigenous and European
styles.6 There are few known ethnographic objects in the NMI’s collection that were
acquired by Catholic missionaries.7

During the nineteenth century many Irishmen served in the British army and navy and the
East India Company. By the 1830s there were probably more Irish than English in the British
army, with the landowning Ascendancy contributing large numbers to officer ranks (Spiers
1996, 335). While they sent their sons to be educated in England, these men maintained a
tripartite identity: always Irish, but under varying conditions, and at different times, also
loyal to Britain and the Empire.8 There were often long‐standing family traditions of
patriotism and service to the Crown, although a variety of economic and social factors also
contributed to the high levels of enrolment. In the nineteenth century these Anglo‐Irish
officers saw service throughout Africa, India, the Pacific and the West Indies. A significant
proportion of ethnographic material acquired by Irishmen serving abroad echoes this British
service history, with many items given to Trinity College Dublin, the RDS and, later, the
Museum of Science and Art. After independence in 1922, these associations were often an
unwelcome reminder of Ireland’s connections to the British Empire.

The collectors’ association with areas of British military or colonial service combined with
their often haphazard approach to collecting means that the collections are very
fragmentary. This is particularly marked in the African material, whose strengths lie in West
and Southern African. It includes early Sande masks from the Ivory Coast, gold‐dust
equipment from Ghana and masquerade paraphernalia from Nigeria. There are various
objects associated with the battlefield, including assegais, beadwork and clothing collected
during the Sekukuni (1876 and 1878–9), Gaika and Galeka (1877) and Zulu (1879) wars in
Southern Africa, and weapons and textiles collected during the Sudanic wars of the 1880s.
Similarly, while nearly 20% of the New Zealand material is documented as having been
collected during the Maori wars of the 1860s, in reality this figure is likely to be higher.9
There are few large collections from Central African areas, reflecting the colonial presence
of the Portuguese, Italians and Belgians, with the exception of the Congo collection of Sir
Roger Casement. Many of these objects were undoubtedly souvenirs of travels, as well as
war trophies and booty—loot collected by the victors.

History of the ethnographic collections of the National Museum of Ireland

The history of the ethnographic collections of the Museum can be divided into four distinct
phases.10 During the first phase, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the
Anglo‐Irish cabinets of curiosities were displayed in private houses or for members of select
antiquarian and philosophical societies. Public access to these collections increased
throughout the nineteenth century and the Irish antiquities became a symbol of wider Irish
nationalist sentiment attached to ownership of the past.

The second phase, from 1877 to 1922, included the transfer of these Dublin based
collections into public ownership through the creation of the Science and Art Museum,
Kildare Street, Dublin. The main purpose of the London‐based Department of Science and
Art and its satellite institutions in Dublin and Edinburgh was public education in the arts and
industrial development. Irish and overseas material, particularly from Europe and Asia,
including foreign ethnographic material, was actively collected to illustrate this.

Phase three was marked by the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, and the
consequent shifts of emphasis and gradual neglect of the ethnographic collections. The
1930s saw Irish archaeological materials rise in importance, becoming vibrant symbols of
national pride and identity. For various reasons, both financial and ideological, both donor
numbers and ethnographic acquisitions fell, becoming static in the 1950s and remaining
relatively constant until recently. Seen by some as an uncomfortable and unwelcome
reminder of an imperialist past, the material was removed from display and put into storage
between 1979 and 2002, brought out on occasion for temporary exhibitions. The
movement of the ethnographic material to a purpose‐built store in 2002 at Collins Barracks
marks the start of a fourth phase. It is only now, in the twenty‐first century, that the
Museum is sufficiently self‐reflective and in a secure enough financial position to consider
the exhibition of the ethnographic collections on a permanent basis.

Phase I: late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century cabinets of

curiosities
The Museum of Science and Art owed its origins to the ideas of the European
Enlightenment, the patriotic zeal of the Anglo‐Irish privileged classes and later nineteenth‐
century Irish nationalism (Wallace 2002, 4). As the National Museum’s director, Dr Patrick
Wallace, has argued, the loss of the old Gaelic ascendancy, with its patronage of the arts,
and its replacement by the establishment of new Dublin‐centred institutions, mainly
Protestant Ascendancy, is central to the story of the Museum. In Ireland, as in Britain, the
antiquarian societies were the domain of the privileged. These included the Dublin Society
for Improving Husbandry and Manufacturing, later the Royal Dublin Society (RDS),
established in 1731, the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), established in 1785, and the Royal
Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI), established in 1849. The natural history, art,
archaeological and ethnographic collections of these institutions became the founding
collections of the Museum of Science and Art.

The collection and display history of the Museum’s ethnographic material before 1877 has
not hitherto been investigated in detail. The early donations of material to the museums of
the Royal Dublin Society and Trinity College (Dublin University) can be considered an
extension of private cabinets of curiosity, collected by gentlemen of leisure. Today they are
seen as essentially decontextualised groups of disparate objects, collected, organised and
displayed idiosyncratically. Ethnographic objects were exhibited as man‐made or ‘artificial’
curiosities, alongside fossils, stuffed animals and archaeological material, with little
information offered on the objects’ originating culture or their usage. Their value was based
on their role as curiosities and their association with the heroism of exploration, particularly
the mythology surrounding Captain Cook. While specimens of natural history were to be
classified and used to illustrate and explain the physical relationships of the natural world,
curiosities were used to entertain and to highlight the diversity of man’s ingenuity. While
Kaeppler (1978, 37) and others have argued that the lack of available terminology meant
that artificial curiosities were regarded as ‘unimportant appendages’ to natural history
collections, more recently authors such as John Mack (2005) and Amiria Henare (2005) have
suggested that the advent of Linnaean taxonomies encouraged the development of parallel
systems to describe this material.11 It was only after 1877, however, that there was
recognition and classification of these curiosities as ethnographic, where the disparate
groups of objects were defined, detached and exhibited as such. Collected by military men
and their families, colonial officials and explorers, the ethnographic material of these early
museums is typical of the common interest in artificial curiosities among the educated
upper classes—weapons, tools and clothing of peoples in far‐flung exotic lands.

The early displays of the museums of the Dublin Society and Trinity College are described in
contemporary literature. The fluid nature of ethnographic material and its ability to move
between collections of natural history and artificalia is evident in the description of the
Dublin Society’s Animal Museum, featuring the ‘figure of an Indian Chief . . . curiosities from
the South Seas’, alongside a lion monkey (marmoset) and other natural history specimens
(Wright 1821, 126). Some of these disparate items were illustrated in Kenhelm Digby’s
unpublished manuscript ,‘The Naturalist’s Companion’, produced between 1812 and 1818.12
Later known for his philosophical writings, Digby included both textual information and
water‐colour illustrations of the antiquities and ethnographic material from the museums of
Trinity College and the Dublin Society, some of which can be identified in the collections
today. While his selection of material was idiosyncratic, his work and methodology
constituted an important step in the cataloguing of the antiquarian and ethnographic
material held in public collections in Ireland (Mulvin 2006, 13).

Trinity College Museum

The Trinity College Museum was founded in 1777 to house the material collected by Dublin‐
born surgeon James Patten on the second Cook voyage (1772–5); his collection of
‘curiosities collected in the South Seas [was] presented by him to the college’.13 The
museum was requested to be fitted with glass cases and was situated in the newly
completed front, in the large vestibule over the gate, signifying the esteem in which the gift
was held. The establishment of museums in universities in Britain and Ireland was mainly a
nineteenth‐century phenomenon, but the Trinity College Museum is one of the earliest,
after the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, which opened in 1683, and the
Sedgewick Museum, University of Cambridge, in 1728.14 Individual colleges certainly held
objects in their libraries, such as the first voyage Cook collection in the Wren Library in
Trinity College, Cambridge.15

A third‐voyage collection (1777–80) was also received by Trinity College in 1781 from Capt.
James King of the Discovery, author of the final volume of the official account of the third
voyage. These objects were brought to Ireland to symbolise new lands and discoveries, and
were publicly exhibited in Trinity College to both educate and entertain their audiences. In
addition, two third‐voyage collections were given to the Hibernian Marine Society in 1780
by Capt. John Williamson and Dublin‐born carpenter George Barber, both of the
Resolution.16 Unlike Trinity College, however, the objects were displayed to raise financial
support for the Society’s charity school for the children of seamen and navy personnel.
When this became impractical, the collections were transferred to Trinity College in 1792 to
join the existing collections of material from Patten and King.

The eccentric layout and connections to the idiosyncratic nature of cabinets of curiosities
are emphasised by early contemporary descriptions of the museum in 1811. Natural history,
archaeology and models appear displayed in haphazard combinations:

‘[the museum is] furnished with a collection of Irish fossils, and a variety of curious
and exotic natural and artificial productions among which is a very good collection of
curiosities from the South Pacific Ocean and the North West Coast of America . . . a
chief mourner’s dress of Otaheiti displays much taste mingled with barbarity, and
one of a naval warrior merits attention . . . a Mohawk warrior in arms, two Egyptian
mummies, a model of a Chinese junk, several Chinese articles of apparel . . . a large
shark . . . [and a] model of the [G]iant’s [C]auseway’ (Dublin Corporation 1811, 91).

The earliest illustration of the museum’s displays dates from 1819 and depicts rows of
sloping, glass‐topped display cabinets. While a large shark and the figure of a giraffe are
clearly present, no ethnographic material, such as the figure of the naval warrior, illustrated
opposite, is visible. It is likely that these are some of the glass cases commissioned in 1777
after Patten’s South Seas donation.

Unfortunately, the existing documentation is fragmentary and there is little mention of the
museum and its collections in the college’s registers. Lists of donations were only
maintained after 1844 and the arrival of the museum’s first director, Dr Robert Ball. The
only ethnographic materials noted in the registers are the curiosities received from Patten
and the Dublin Marine Society. The occasional acquisition of shells, fossils and medals is
noted, but there is no mention of the Mohawk warrior, mummies or Chinese material
described above. Although King’s donation is highlighted in the guidebook A Picture of
Dublin (1811), he is not listed as a donor in the registers but appears instead as the recipient
of an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws in January 1781. This was presumably given to him
in recognition of his gift, in the same way that Patten was rewarded with the honorary
degree of Doctor of Physick in July 1780. This lack of documentation was not unusual and
much of King’s 1880 donation to the British Museum remains inseparable from that of Capt.
James Burney and Capt. John Williamson. Unlike the first‐voyage collections of Lord
Sandwich, given to Trinity College, Cambridge, now in the Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology, Cambridge, and those of Johann and George Forster, given to the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford, no lists of the material have been located, making it difficult to identify
donors of individual objects.
'Dress of a Naval Warrior from Otaheite', 1810, in The Naturalist’s Companion, containing
drawings with suitable descriptions of a vast variety of Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Serpents
and Insects.... an illustrated manuscript by Kenelm Henry Digby. (Ref: PXE 869/f. 220.)

A total of five fau, basketry and feathered headdresses, are known to have been collected
on the Cook voyages. Unfortunately, only the examples in the British Museum and the Pitt
Rivers Museum appear to have survived. Today only the only the warrior’s taumi, the gorget
decorated with shark teeth and feathers, and the wooden club can be identified in NMI’s
collections.
Part of the problem lay in the museum’s early caretakers being natural scientists, who
adhered to the Enlightenment view of the world and the division of its materials into
natural and artificial curiosities, a practice common in early museums. It is likely that Dr
Thomas Wilson, Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, arranged the layout of
the glass‐topped cases, but it was his successor, geologist, antiquarian William Hamilton,
who was responsible for the development of the early museum from 1780 to 1790. While
Dr ‘Jacky’ Barratt, later librarian and vice‐provost, was briefly appointed keeper between
1790 and 1791,17 the museum advanced significantly under the long curatorship of Dr
Whitley Stokes, later Regis Professor of Medicine, from 1791 until the year before his death
in 1845. The college’s commitment to contemporary scientific developments and
discoveries and Stokes’ personal interests in natural history led to the emphasis on the
natural history and geological collections. The fossils and minerals were carefully catalogued
and arranged by type, and published, with Stokes adding to the collections from his own
property.18 Stokes also used the museum as part of his teaching, requesting bird specimens
and books, and lecturing on mines and minerals. There is no mention in the college registers
of ethnographic material on display, nor of its usage in teaching, possibly owing in part to its
submersion as part of the natural history collections. The library was subject to annual
checks, reported in the registers, but not the museum. Stokes’ influence meant that by
1845 the museum was referred to as the College Museum of Natural History and Antiquities
(Taylor 1845, 296). Despite these emphases, new acquisitions of ethnographic objects were
listed at regular intervals from 1844 in Robert Ball’s Reports on the Dublin University
Museum and later in the Lists of Donors to the Dublin University Museum.

The 1821 Historical guide to Dublin describes twelve of the museum’s display cases, the first
five of which contained South Seas material. These were ordered by both material type and
area, suggesting early classificatory systems. These cases were titled ‘Ornaments from the
Marquesas, Friendly and Sandwich Islands, New Zealand and Otaheiti’, ‘Otaheitan Dresses
and Models’, and ‘New Zealand Dresses and Implements’ (Wright 1821, 20–1). These cases
may date from the original 1777 layout and were presumably all from the Cook voyage
donations. The other cases held an intriguing mixture of archaeological, natural history and
ethnographic objects:

‘various celts . . . arrow‐heads . . . the Irish harp, once the property of King Brian
Boromhe . . . a few stuffed animals . . . In the centre of the great room stands a
stuffed camel‐leopard [giraffe]’ (ibid.).

The Rt Hon. William Conyngham gave the harp to the college in 1860, and the giraffe skin
was received from the first governor of the Cape, Lord Caledon, in 1812. The scarcity of
references in the College registers to ethnographic as well as archaeological material
received between 1777, when the museum was established, and 1844, suggests that other
donations may also have been received but not recorded. It is likely that some of these
were housed in the library, as other material was later transferred from there to the
museum, just as the Trinity College Cambridge Cook–Sandwich collection was transferred
from the Wren Library to the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, in
1914.

The Trinity College Museum remained open to the public on a regular basis, and was
habitually recorded as an attraction in contemporary guidebooks to the city. Despite Stokes’
hard work, however, the minerals were overshadowed by the more inclusive collections of
the RDS (Wright 1821, 21). By 1853, on the eve of the opening of the new Geology Museum
on the same site, the museum was considered cramped and badly overcrowded and the
ethnographic specimens regarded as curios, their associations and contexts overlooked.

Royal Dublin Society Museum

The Dublin Society’s museum was first noted at the Society’s newly established Botanic
Gardens, Glasnevin, in 1797, though the Leskean mineral cabinet, purchased in 1792, was
already displayed at their Hawkins Street repository. The Proceedings of the Society lists
donations of seeds, plants and minerals from 1797, though the first donation of
ethnographic material, a model South American hut, bow and arrows, is noted in 1801.19
The natural history specimens were moved to Hawkins Street in 1799, and it was here that
the ethnographic material was later displayed. As donations to the museum were only
included in the Proceedings after 1800, it is possible that, like Trinity College, ethnographic
material was donated earlier but not recorded.

The Picture of Dublin for 1811 purported to be a ‘correct’ guide to the city and it included
the Society’s museum on Hawkins Street as well as the Trinity College museum. The
description highlighted the variety of material on display, with natural history and
ethnographic material exhibited together:

‘The room is 60 feet long, by 30 broad, is well lighted, and possesses a rich variety of
natural and artificial curiosities. Near the door, is a collection of fish . . . a rich variety
of birds . . . the lion monkey, and several other beasts . . . The curiosities from the
South sea islands, though they are not numerous, yet are worthy of notice. Two
idols, from the Sandwich islands, present a hideous rudeness. These two idols, with
 one from Japan, some weapons of war, musical instruments, shells, a shark’s jaw
bone, &c., &c. were lately part of the collection of Mr Ellis, of Dublin, the whole of
which is now purchased by the Society, to be added to the Museum. The collections
of insects, butterflies, shells &c are numerous and worthy of inspection’ (Dublin
Corporation 1811, 122).

The two Hawaiian figures, noted above as Sandwich Islands idols, can be identified from an
illustration in Digby’s ‘Companion’. They were part of a private museum belonging to John
Ellis, a painter and entrepreneur, situated in the rear of his house on Mary Street 1792–c.
1806.20 The origins of Ellis’s collections are unknown, but it is possible that the 26 pieces
from the collections of the RDS identified as dating from the eighteenth century may have
come from the collections of John Ellis. They may equally have other, as yet unidentified,
sources, however. Lack of documentation is common in late eighteenth‐ and early
nineteenth‐century collections, and is a remnant of the different attitudes to the
organisation and character of the early cabinets of curiosities. These objects were important
primarily for their ‘otherness’ and their associations with exploration or foreign travel. Their
actual provenance and donor history was less important, with the exception of heroic
individuals such as Captain Cook.

The focus of the Society’s museum continued to be natural history, no doubt assisted by the
appointment of noted mineralogist Sir Charles Giesecke as Professor of Mineralogy in 1813,
and later keeper of the museum. This emphasis was highlighted by the publication of the
Catalogue of the subjects of natural history in the museum (O’Reilly 1813), which listed
material ‘according to the latest improvements in the Linnaean system’. The catalogue
included 6,000 specimens but incorporated 500 ‘Antiquities, Indian Arms and Armour,
Ornaments &c’ as part of the ‘Miscellaneous’ section.21 Significantly, the Society proudly
claimed that the publication of the catalogue ‘opened a new source of public instruction—
hereto no Museum in Ireland, [was] systematically arranged, [and] accessible for the study
of Natural History’.22

The Society moved to Leinster House in 1815, where the museum was open to the public
two afternoons a week and daily for students. The new keeper, Giesecke, ordered the
collections systematically, and arranged them throughout a suite of six rooms. This included
a ‘miscellaneous assemblage of curiosities’ with examples of archaeology, natural history
and ethnographic material:

‘The First Room contains . . . a mummy, a figure clad in the armour of the
Tigerguards of Tippoo Sultan . . . a curious Irish regal sceptre . . . [in] the Second
room. . . the animal kingdom is displayed, arranged in six classes . . . The Third Room
contains the mineralogical portion of the collections . . . In the Fourth Room are
 developed the natural history of Greenland and the habits of the natives . . . The
Fifth Room contains the remaining, or geological part of the Leskean collection [of
minerals], interesting Antiquities . . . The Sixth Room, is the Museum Hibernicum;
and contains mineralogical and geological specimens from the thirty‐two counties in
Ireland’ (Wright 1821, 31–6).

The material was displayed very differently to its earlier incarnation in Hawkins Street in
1811, and overall appears more systematically organised than that in Trinity College.
Giesecke used systematic or characteristic collections of natural history specimens and
minerals to create order by documenting and cataloguing the world. This was augmented
by the formation of hierarchical series and the classification of objects by type.23 The
material reflected a growing knowledge of the world and a desire to categorise and identify,
and thereby civilise and control, the natural environment and its inhabitants. Knowledge
was now definable and controllable, and objects were displayed and identified by their
functions.24 This need to classify material crystallised in the building of the Natural History
Museum, which opened in 1857 on the south side of the lawns of Leinster House.

The early nineteenth‐century Gaelic cultural revival provided the background and impetus
later in the century to highlight the national importance of collections of Irish antiquities,
and these were utilised in the push to make the private society’s collections public.25 Early
elements of Irish nationalism emerge in 1811 in the assertion regarding the Dublin Society’s
museum that as ‘a repository for scarce and valuable productions &c. it claims particular
attention; it is the first in the Kingdom, and may be called the Irish Museum’.26 This
patriotism was part of the Anglo‐Irish assertion of Ireland’s place within the larger political
and cultural unit of Britain. While the political power of the Anglo‐Irish was at its height in
the later eighteenth century, this ended with the Act of Union in 1800. Ireland may have
lost its parliament but, significantly, the private societies still believed that they were
leading Ireland’s cultural and industrial development, and that their antiquities held a
prominent and respected place in Europe (Crooke 2000, 70–1). Making the collections
available for ‘public instruction’ in 1813 was one of the first steps towards the private
collections becoming public endeavours, which was finally realised in 1877.

Phase II: Science and Art Department, 1877–1922

Requests from the RDS for continued municipal funding for its expanding museum activities
and public programme, and the desire to relocate the antiquities collections of the RIA, led
to the development of a state‐run institution. While subsidies to the RDS had fallen steadily
du ing the nineteenth century, government studies noted that it was ‘desirable that there
should be a General Industrial and Fine Art Museum in Dublin. The people of Ireland would
thus obtain the fullest opportunity of improvement in the cultivation of the Industrial and
Decorative Arts by the study of approved models and objects’, based very closely on Henry
Cole’s vision of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).27 This educating fervour and
direction from London should be seen within the context of the growth of Western
imperialism, industrialism and the development of museums throughout Britain. The
museum was seen as the ideal vehicle for public education, and it was thought that, by
contemplating the displayed cultural artefacts, the common man and woman would
become ‘receptive to their improving influence’ (Lidchi 1997, 191). While the Science and
Art Department aimed to disseminate knowledge of manufacturing, aesthetics and culture
throughout Britain and Ireland, there were also more imperial intentions: to ‘naturalise’
state intervention as an ideal governing tool and to produce a sense of national identity, or
rather a commitment to the British nation as administered from London.28 The
management of the Museum was an expression of the power dynamics between the
Department, the private societies and the museum‐going public, and demonstrates the
strength of the London administration in Ireland at that time (Crooke 2000, 127; J. Bennett
1997, 39). In practice, this meant that the Museum’s management, financial resources and
collecting policy were directed from London. An annual budget was assigned, and purchases
over £20 needed official sanction.29

The governance of the Dublin Museum was a matter of some controversy at the time. The
placing of the private societies’ collections under the control of a London department was
reported in the newspapers, particularly those with a nationalist bent, as it ran opposed to
the desire of many to create an Irish museum to house Irish antiquities. While the Museum
may have been referred to in England as the ‘Dublin Science and Art Museum’, Crooke
(2000, 115) has noted that by the early 1900s it was spoken of as the ‘National Museum’ in
Dublin, and thus symbolised different things to different people.

Initially taking over the museum space in the old RDS headquarters of Leinster House,
Kildare Street, the new Museum building gradually took shape next door and was opened in
1885 by the Prince of Wales. The Museum’s director, Dr Valentine Ball (son of Trinity
College’s Robert Ball), declared that it would be ‘illustrative of the arts and industries of this
country and at various periods of her history’.30 Field guns captured by Lord Gough from the
Sikhs, classical statues and carriages were on display in the rotunda, with antiquities from
the RIA on the first floor. The ethnographic displays in Room III, now the Treasury, were
geographically arranged, as in 1885 the ‘series are too limited as yet to illustrate the
evolutionary system made famous by General Pitt‐Rivers’ collection.’31 The ethnographic
displays were central to ideas of social evolution, and existed for the edification of the
scholar and the casual visitor. They aimed to ‘show the characteristics of the races of men’
and ‘primitive art among savage nations’.32
The acquisition of ethnographic material was significant during the early stages of the
Museum’s history. The first ethnographic material received by the Museum of Science and
Art was part of the collection of c. 2,000 objects transferred from the RDS to state
ownership between 1878 and 1898, and around 400 of these were ethnographic.33 In 1882
the Board of Trinity College presented ‘The Cook Collection of Miscellaneous Articles
(Clothing, &c.), connected with Polynesian Islands’. In reality this transfer consisted of
approximately 200 objects from Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific and included
material from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The actual ‘Cook Collection’
component of this donation has been identified as comprising 127 objects typical of those
collected on the last two voyages of discovery (Hand, forthcoming). In total, nearly 600
ethnographic objects from Trinity College were transferred during the 1880s and 1890s. The
college went on to deposit over 500 weapons in 1894, and eighteen of these may also have
been collected during the Cook voyages. While the deposit also included a large number of
Fijian clubs, probably from the 1856 collection of Trinity College botanist Dr William Harvey,
the lack of any documentation means that it is often impossible to assign donors to
individual objects.

Significantly, the Museum pursued an active acquisitions policy during the late 1880s to the
early 1900s. Approximately 3,000 ethnographic objects were accessioned in the 1880s
(including c. 600 purchases), with nearly 2,000 in the 1890s (including c.1,000 purchases).
Accessions continued to average 1,000 objects in each of the first three decades of the
twentieth century, only to halve in the 1940s. The majority were received through donation,
with another approximately 2,500 objects offered as loans from 1878 to the present. The
Museum purchased single objects and collections of material from individuals, and also
obtained pieces from salerooms and auction houses in Ireland and England, such as Jamrach
and Webster’s. Large collections of material from New Guinea, the Torres Strait and
Senegambia were purchased during the 1890s; of the 260 objects purchased in 1890, 94
came from New Guinea. Initial research indicates that a number of these were probably
collected by the explorer Theodore Bevan and were part of large‐scale European collecting
activity in the area. Bevan’s collection includes large barkcloth masks, boards and shields
from the Papuan Gulf, some of which were also purchased by the South Australia
Museum.34 The Museum also bought material collected by zoologist‐cum‐anthropologist
Alfred Haddon on his 1888 expedition to the Torres Strait, and Thomas Longford, technical
assistant, travelled to London to examine the collection in the British Museum, selecting
examples with Haddon’s assistance.35 Material was also transferred from Dublin’s sister
museums, ranging from casts of North American material and Asian life‐masks from the
South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) to samples of barkcloth from the Edinburgh
Museum of Science and Industry.
The older and established exhibits in the British Museum highlight the changes in the
display of ethnographic material during the late nineteenth century. While during the 1860s
ethnographic material was exhibited to substantiate archaeological finds from prehistoric
Europe, this was gradually replaced by the development of evolutionary theory during the
following decades and by the 1890s focused on the social evolution of non‐literate societies,
using material from specific geographic areas.36 The geographical classificatory system that
developed was one that perpetuated distinctions and divisions that were culturally and
historically constructed, and served to structure displays that represented a distinct
historical moment. The material was defined as ‘other’ and displayed in the ethnographic
present, presupposing a static primitive world.

These collections were primarily the material culture of groups that were seen as ‘exotic’,
‘savage’, ‘primitive’ or ‘vanishing’ and were contrasted with the complex civilisations of the
Far East. The Art and Industrial Division included separate collections, such as Japanese Art,
Chinese Art, Burmese Art, Miniatures, Bronze and Ironwork, as well as the Ethnographic
Collection. These divisions reflected the ability of ethnographic material to represent the art
and techniques of manufacture of the ‘different primitive races represented in the
Museum’, as well as to illustrate the decorative ‘high’ art styles of the Orient.37 While
terracotta slabs from a Burmese temple were used to illustrate a certain style of decoration,
a Haida argillite pipe was regarded instead as an example of primitive art and therefore was
classified by its function only as an article of domestic use. Today this division continues, as
the majority of the Asian material is part of the Eastern Art or Ceramics Collection, not the
Ethnographic Collection.

In effect, the ethnographic displays were collections of non‐European objects, the majority
collected within the British Empire by her commanding officers. This imperialist element,
common in Western museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can be
seen in the Museum’s early displays and labels. The collector was paramount, with the
battle or collection origins identified but with little contextual information. Personal
paraphernalia connected to famous individuals was highlighted in the labels. Examples
include a pipe‐stem recorded as the property of Black Hawk, war leader of the Sauk (Sac)
and Fox (Mesquakie), who fought with the British against the Americans in the 1812 war,
and the coat of Louis Reil, the defeated Canadian Metis leader, executed in 1885.

The early donations bear witness to the wide‐ranging travels of the armed forces and
colonial officers. Areas colonised by Britain were well represented, unlike those under the
political rule of Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy or Portugal. For example, in 1884 Staff
Surgeon MacCarthy donated a Fijian club; a Captain Cary gave peccary‐teeth necklaces from
British Guyana; a Richard Miller offered basketry from Bonny (Nigeria); and in 1888 a Major
Manly donated a pipe from Ladak, Tibet, a collection of Zulu material, nuts from South
America and beads from India. Collections such as Major Jasper Grant’s early nineteenth‐
century material from the Great Lakes (purchased from his son‐in‐law by the Museum in
1902) offer insights into the Native American groups and traders visiting military forts on
the Lakes between 1800 and 1806, and suggest the trading links and reciprocal relationships
between local chiefs and the military, as exemplified by gifts of wampum.

One of the most inclusive and best‐provenanced collections from a colonial officer is that of
Arthur William Mahaffy, son of the provost of Trinity College, loaned to the Museum in
1922 and purchased a year later.38 Mahaffy held various posts in the Pacific between 1895
and 1914, including deputy commissioner of the Solomon Islands, colonial secretary of Fiji
and resident commissioner of the Ellice and Gilbert Islands. As assistant to the resident
commissioner of the Solomon Island Protectorate, Charles Woodford, Mahaffy’s main role
was to recruit a native police force to suppress head‐hunting raids in the Western
Solomons. Mahaffy held a typical nineteenth century view of vanishing cultures, and
believed that head‐hunting raids only exacerbated and speeded up their demise.
Punishment of offending villages and the wholesale destruction of the head‐hunting canoes
were seen as effective deterrents. Mahaffy collected items of personal adornment,
weapons, clothing, games and utilitarian objects, including the chisels with which he was
tattooed in the Gilbert Islands. He also, however, collected numerous trophies that
demonstrated his mission’s success and what he saw as the path to civilisation.

The ambiguity and uneven power relationships of many colonial collections are evident in
the material taken in raids. Bareka (shell currency rings) and cachelot (whales’ teeth) were
recorded as ‘part of the loot from Nusaru in the Rubiana Lagoon’, along with an ornament
‘taken from the inside of the house of Zito, chief of Biloa on Vella Lavella, destroyed by me
in October 1901’. Despite the destructive nature of some of his collecting, he believed that
he was acting for the good of the people he governed. He attempted to understand select
elements of the local culture, holding a large feast on the island to which he invited all the
local chiefs, somewhat patronisingly including those he had raided. The collection also
includes gifts from influential Islanders and European residents, evidence of the way in
which both Europeans and Islanders utilised gifts and objects to create relationships and
obligations. These gifts include a Samoan wooden dish given him by the ‘Silei or Levei Malo,
the taupo or princess of Falefa—her “chief name was Fenunuivao”’, and Samoan orators’
staffs ‘given to me at Jalent by Talea the faipule (orator) of Mataafa’.

The ethnographic collections reflected the Irish role in an ever‐expanding arena, where
souvenirs, loot and examples of new technologies and materials were avidly collected and
donated to the Museum. Collecting has been described as a form of conquest, where the
artefacts are ‘a material sign of victory over their former owners and places of origins’.39
Objects such as Amazonian headdresses, originally exhibited at Dublin’s Great Industrial
Exhibition of 1853, made the colonial world both visible and tangible. The Museum was a
small but significant element in the British colonising process, acting as a model of the
Empire, and justifying the need for progress and civilising governance, exemplified by the
spoils of the Benin Punitive Expedition and the loot of Arthur Mahaffy (Classen and Howes
2006, 210). In a similar way, Captain Davidson‐Houston, resident on the Gold Coast,
collected numerous goldweights and associated material, as well as objects from
Asantehene Prempeh’s palace in Kumasi (Bravman 1974).40 Some of these pieces were
given to him as gifts, but it is likely that some, such as chairs and two state swords, were
collected during the sacking of the palace in 1896. The collections of British consul Sir Roger
Casement are particularly poignant. Casement investigated working conditions in the
Belgian Congo rubber districts and the Putumayo region of Peru on behalf of the British
government and also acquired baskets, musical instruments, weapons and ritual
paraphernalia. His execution for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising highlights, however, the
stark duality of the Irish participation in the British Empire and Ireland’s own colonial
experience.

The display and categorisation of the material was rooted in and perpetuated theories of
racial difference. The display cases remained geographically organised, similar to other
ethnographical displays at the time in the British Museum and the Cambridge University
Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, although by 1910 they were described as ‘ill‐lit’ and
‘filled to overflowing’.41 Dublin Museum staff visited museums in Bristol, Cardiff and London
for training into the 1930s. Museum guides were often similar to others in the Science and
Art Department, particularly where Dublin held the electrotypes of collections held by the
British Museum. From 1901 the displays were arranged in geographical sections but
labelled thematically, with ‘Implements for Making Fire; Implements of War and Chase;
Musical Instruments; Clothing; Articles of Domestic use; Implements of Agriculture; Articles
associated with Religion; Ornament; Miscellaneous’.42 The Museum’s director, Colonel G.T.
Plunkett, noted that these were based in part on the Pitt Rivers Museum’s system in
conjunction with the older classification according to localities. Similar divisions can be seen
in the British Museum’s Handbook to the Ethnographical Collection, published in 1905 and
1910. Dr Meyer, director of the Royal Zoological, Anthropological and Ethnographic
Museum in Dresden, commented in 1905 on the uniformity of the museums in the United
Kingdom, and the similarity of the management structure, object layout and subjects of the
Dublin collections to those in Edinburgh, Liverpool and Glasgow.43 These similarities and the
display of objects from colonial territories in the ethnographic present were based on a
common imperialist representation of the world.
While in 1898 Colonel Plunkett had felt that the Museum benefited greatly from the close
connections to the South Kensington institutions, this view was not universal. Arnold
Graves, interviewed the following year as a representative of Irish industry, was in favour of
self‐governance, and argued that in Ireland public opinion supported local control of the
Museum.44 In 1899 the Museum’s management passed to an Irish‐based managerial board
at the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI), and it was the next
director, George Noble, Count Plunkett, a recognised nationalist, who oversaw the
Museum’s change of name to the ‘National Museum of Science and Art, Dublin’, in 1908.45
This was a name he noted ‘as more appropriate for the institution having regard to its
representative position in the capital as the Museum of Ireland and the treasury of Celtic
Antiquities’ (cited in Crooke 2000, 137–8). He began to prioritise the exhibition of the Irish
archaeological material, a move fully completed after independence. The archaeological
displays were relocated from the first to the ground floor and thus to the forefront of public
attention, as Count Plunkett emphasised that ‘our work inclines largely towards the
collection of things distinctly Irish, both ancient and modern’ (Plunkett 1909, 1).

This archaeological focus partly reflects the nationalist political climate at the time, and it
continued throughout the twentieth century, suggesting that the Museum echoed rather
than solely influenced current trends. Plunkett also actively pursued the exchange of Irish
objects with other museums throughout the British Empire, and in 1914 Australian
ethnographic material was received from the Museum of Western Australia in return for a
cast of an Irish high cross.46 His aim was the acquisition of scarce foreign ethnographic items
rather than the return of Irish material from overseas, later attempted by Director A.T.
Lucas. Plunkett also appears to have been attempting to create further connections with
colonial territories where there was a large Irish immigrant population. The National
Museum was challenging the representative role of the British Museum, which was seen by
many in England as a ‘Central Imperial Museum’47 and regarded by its director, Sir Edmond
Thompson, as representing ‘every portion of the British Empire’.48 This challenge was
particularly reflected in the National Museum’s acquisition of the Broighter Hoard, an Irish
treasure trove. The material was reclaimed from the British Museum in 1903 following a
celebrated court case in which Count Plunkett had argued convincingly that the ‘museum in
Dublin is recognized and is a national museum, quite as much as the British Museum’.49 It is
ironic that the hoard was discovered in County Londonderry, which following partition is
now part of Northern Ireland.50

The ethnographic displays were rearranged by Geoffrey Stanton between 1912 and 1915,
and new acquisitions numbered from c. 50 to 300 per year, suggesting the ongoing
significance of the ethnographic collections. For the period 1916–20, however, acquisitions
numbered less than 100, with only twenty objects purchased, highlighting the effect of the
external political turmoil on the work of the Museum. Budgets were slashed and, in
addition to coal shortages, several staff members participated in the war in Europe. On his
return from the war with the rank of lieutenant, Stanton produced handwritten catalogues
of Pacific material, with descriptions and illustrations in preparation for publication. These
were based on subject divisions such as ‘The Hunt and the Chase’, ‘Domestic Utensils’ etc.,
and reflected the earlier subdivisions.51

Such catalogues depicted the permanent displays. These didactic displays continued to
reflect an imperial world‐view and were to remain in place, with minimal alterations, until
1970s. Labels identifying defeated protagonists such as the Zulu Chief Cetshwayo
kaMpande, with ‘Cetewayo’s kilt . . . Captured by Major McCalmont, during the pursuit of
the Zulu king’, items taken from the battlefield in the Sudan and ‘a fetish taken from a
house of a superior class at Lagos [Nigeria]’ perpetuated this jingoism. (These labels still
accompany many objects today and appear to be based on Stanton’s texts.) Duncan
Cameron’s analysis of the traditional form of the museum as a temple (as opposed to the
museum as a forum) is a useful distinction and highlights the way the Museum performed a
‘timeless and universal function, the use of a structured sample of reality, not only as a
reference, but as an objective model against which to compare individual perceptions’.52
Significantly, the Museum also acted as a ‘visual encyclopaedia of knowledge about the
Empire’ (Mackenzie 2009, 2). The Museum maintained this role through the display of the
ethnographic collections through much of the twentieth century, but became increasingly
uncomfortable with it during the third phase.

Phase III: National Museum of Ireland, 1922–97

The emergence of the Irish Free State in 1922 had a significant impact on the future of the
Museum that went beyond the change of name to the National Museum of Ireland. The
establishment of the Dáil (the parliament of the Republic of Ireland) in Leinster House put
pressure on space in the Museum next door. The Museum closed to the public in 1922, as
office space had to be found for Museum staff evicted from Leinster House, and a number
of galleries in Kildare Street were converted for this purpose. A significant staff turnover
ensued and many were not replaced. The identity, aims and functions of a National
Museum and the effective delivery of these were soon investigated by the new
government.

Several key ethnographic collections were acquired in the early 1920s, despite the Museum
remaining closed and the already overcrowded display cases, which often doubled as visible
storage. The Mahaffy Pacific collection of over 500 objects was purchased in 1923 and a
large loan of West African material was received in 924 from Capt. Norton Trail, resident
commissioner in Nigeria, which included important Mama masks and a maternity figure,
though the collection was not catalogued immediately. A hint of the political turmoil
outside the Museum is evident in comments made by Rachel Mahaffy, sister of the collector
Arthur Mahaffy: ‘I feel it is fully useless to think of their [the collection] staying in this
unhappy country where nothing but politics seem to count in public affairs’.53 This period of
upheaval may have influenced the low number of ethnographic objects acquired in the
latter half of the 1920s, with less than fifteen objects acquired per year from 1924 to 1929.

The Museum continued to feel the effects of political change, and was effectively rudderless
for a significant period. Count Plunkett was dismissed in 1916, following the Easter Rising.
Dr Robert Scharff, keeper of the Natural History Division, was appointed acting director,
followed by Mr J.J. Buckley (1921–9), but the Museum was without a director from 1929
until the appointment of Dr Adolf Mahr in 1934. The acting directors ‘exercised little or no
influence on the development of the Museum’ during this period (Quane 1947, 36). In 1924
the Board of Visitors lamented that, amongst others, ‘the Ethnographical [section has] no
one to continue even the immediately necessary work of arrangement and cataloguing’ and
that ‘competent keepers’ were required to ‘preserve the unrivalled and invaluable
collections which have been acquired for the Nation’.54 It is interesting to note that
Geoffrey Stanton disappears from the staff lists after 1922, and his catalogues on the
collections were never published. It is likely that Stanton left Ireland following the
establishment of the Irish Free State, as did a number of Anglo‐Irish professionals, leaving
the Museum short‐staffed, particularly in the ethnographic and geological sections.

In 1927 the purposes and needs of the National Museum were questioned by a committee
of five Irish experts, headed by Professor Lithberg, director of the Northern Museum in
Stockholm. The committee’s findings were popularly termed the Lithberg Report (see
Cooke, this volume). Lithberg suggested that the Museum should investigate past
civilisation and present‐day culture in three main categories of antiquities, folklore and
applied art. The report concluded that the role of the Museum was ‘to accumulate,
preserve and display such objects as may serve to increase and define the knowledge of
Irish Civilisations, of the National History of Ireland, and of the relations of Ireland in these
respects with other countries’ (Lithberg 1927, 2). Its practical recommendations included
the rearrangement of the exhibits (in particular reversing the prominence of the Industrial
collections with Irish archaeological material) and, most importantly, highlighting the
importance of creating an Irish ethnographic collection. The report did not sideline the
foreign ethnographic collections, rather suggesting that they and the Mediterranean
collections should flank the archaeological material and act as comparative examples.
Nevertheless, it was only those elements of the report that emphasised the importance of
collecting historic Irish material that were adopted. The prioritisation and rearrangement of
the archaeological collections as recommended in the report’s main findings began to be
implemented in the 1930s under the new directorship of Austrian archaeologist Adolf Mahr,
who was also the keeper of the Irish Antiquities Division. The archaeological acquisitions of
the Antiquities Division began to outstrip those of the Art and Industrial Division for the first
time in 1929. Existing collections and excavated material were acquired, and the ground‐
floor casts of European statuary were replaced by archaeological material. This emphasis
continued and, when acquisitions reached a record of nearly 10,000 in 1932, c. 8,700
objects were flint implements. As part of Lithberg’s recommendations, from 1931 the
ethnographic collections were listed as a subsection of the Irish Antiquities Division, under
the heading ‘Comparative Archaeology and Ethnology’.55 This is the source of the existing
AE prefix of the Ethnographic Collection accession numbers. The dual identity and purpose
of Asian ethnographic material as comparative teaching materials and illustration becomes
clear, as some Asian material (such as the Albert Bender collection of Tibetan, Chinese and
Japanese objects) was referenced both as part of the Comparative collections and the Art
and Industry donations. The majority of Asian acquisitions remained listed under Art and
Industry, reflecting their associations with decorative art.

Several large collections acquired in the 1930s continued to highlight the imperial collecting
arena. These included a late nineteenth‐century collection of Southern African material
given by Colonel and Lady Garroway, Asante goldweights from Espine Ward and Nigerian
material from a Mrs Ormsby. The majority of acquisitions in this decade were
archaeological, however, and the amassed collections of Hugh Kirk and Revd Hewson were
purchased, though these also included a number of ethnographic objects. Ethnographic
material reflected a ‘primitive’ world, one that was gradually becoming less relevant to
contemporary society, while archaeology and native ethnography (referred to as Irish
folklife) were used to foster and reignite a sense of pride in the Irish rural and artistic, often
idealised, past. While the foreign ethnographic collections reflected the involvement of Irish
men and women as settlers and travellers abroad, they also, less admirably, appeared to
celebrate their involvement in the British Empire. The Museum’s nationalist focus on the
collections of Irish Antiquities and Folklore was celebrated in the press, especially as it took
away the ‘Imperial war medals and uniforms [and ] . . . the disgusting spectacle of a dead or
dying sepoy at the feet of a British Officer was removed from our offended eyes.’(Irish
Press, 27 May 1937). The terminology used to describe and differentiate the foreign
ethnographic collections and that of Irish folklife also reflects the history of ethnology under
colonialism, where the term ethnology ‘came to mean the study of dark‐skinned, non‐
European, uncivilised peoples’ (Ó Cadhla 2007, 53).56 Folklore, however, emphasised a
shared history and tradition, but still contained elements of nationalist ideology—of ‘us’
against ‘them’.
The New Zealand case with Maori taonga (treasures), including carvings and feathered
textiles, during the 1970s. Material was geographically arranged in crowded display cases,
which also acted as a form of storage. National Museum of Ireland, Dublin.

(Image: copyright Peter Gathercole.)

Events inside the Museum reflected the external political situation. For a period in the
1930s the Art and Industry accession registers were written in Irish rather than English,
signifying both an official promotion of the Irish language and culture and new emphases
within the Museum. The central aim of the Museum was to celebrate Irish culture, and the
ethnographic collections became gradually devalued, as their historic connections were
unwanted. While foreign material continued to be acquired, the recommendations made in
1927 ensured that Irish ethnographic material was also collected, if not to the extent
suggested.

From the 1940s onwards the foreign ethnographic collections began to be marginalised.
Director and Irish Antiquities keeper Adolf Mahr remained in Germany throughout the war,
and by 1947 the Irish Antiquities Division was run by one assistant, with vacancies for three
assistants and keeper. The Museum was under the administrative control of the keeper of
Natural History, Dr O’Connor. The last large collection acquired before the collections were
put into storage was Pacific material collected by Gerald Purcell Fitzgerald ‘during a
prolonged visit to the Polynesian and Melanesian Islands about the year 1885’. This was
donated in 1948 and, with a collection of Ghanaian goldweights, was the only major
acquisition in the 1940s, during which decade less than 300 objects were acquired. In his
1947 report on the current status and needs of the National Museum, Michael Quane
highlighted the purpose of the National Museum as being ‘to teach the world about Ireland,
and the Irish people about their own motherland’, and warned that it was unfair to future
generations that Irish folklife material should be neglected in favour of the foreign
ethnography (Quane 1947, 10 and 8). While it took until 1974 to establish the Folklife
Division, ‘hiving off portions of the later, rural, material from Irish Antiquities’
(MacLochlainn et al. 1977, 7), for the next 50 years the foreign ethnographic collections
remained relatively static, following the Museum’s changing focus.

A number of factors contributed to the move of the ethnographic collections into crated
storage in 1979. The gallery had been closed for some time and used partially as a storage
room, as it had in the 1920s. The material was seen by some as irrelevant to the Irish focus
of the Museum, and there was little interest in investigating or acknowledging the
collections’ imperialist origins. This reflected a general lack of interest at this time. As the
Irish involvement within the empire began to be made transparent, the results of the British
colonising process abroad were identified with similar changes in Ireland. While monuments
of British monarchs became sites of contestation and destruction (Whelan 2002) the
attitude towards the ethnographic material has been less dramatic, and more of
disassociation and disinterest in comparison to other collections. Several pieces were
repatriated in the early 1970s, including the most dramatic element of the Polynesian
collection, the Tahitian chief mourner’s costume, and the coat of Louis Reil, metis rebel
leader. The coat was given to the Canadian government, and the mourner’s costume was
sent to the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, in 1971, in time for their exhibition of Artificial
curiosities: an exposition of native manufactures collected on the three Pacific voyages of
Captain James Cook, R.N. The costume had become dismantled since its display in 1949 and
it lay unrecognised and separated in display cases and storage. It is likely that the Museum’s
director, Dr Lucas, felt that the costume would be more accessible at a centre of Polynesian
studies.

More significantly, his actions appear to have been an unsuccessful attempt to establish
precedent for the return of Irish material from overseas museums, particularly in Britain. An
internal report of 1972 on the ethnographic collections noted that the ‘collections were not
being put to maximum use’ and that ‘these objects deserve the sort of attention they can
receive only in museums where such material is of primary interest’. The report continued
that the collection’s public effect was ‘largely negative’: ‘There [is] also more than a touch
of Imperialism . . . Clubs, spears, swords and tomahawks of defeated tribes fill nearly every
case . . . British Officers’ souvenirs and booty, range from ugly curios to Benin treasures . . .
Rebels are represented in defeat. A century ago, the message of this collection was
progress—with technological achievement, we were told, reason and decency would
increasingly prevail, especially under British Guidance. The message today of these identical
displays is of the destruction of life styles’ (Carpenter 1972). Long‐term chronic
underfunding of the Museum and a focus on Irish antiquities meant that there were no
specialist staff responsible for the collection, which limited physical and intellectual access.
The gallery was closed in the late 1970s and remained so until pressure of space meant that
it was dismantled in 1979 to make way for the new Treasures of Ireland exhibition,
highlighting Irish material such as the Ardagh Chalice and the Tara Brooch.

Strategic plans from 1980 onwards discussed the re‐exhibition of the ethnographic
collections, and Brian Cranstone of the Pitt Rivers Museum was commissioned to research
the material and to suggest display ideas. Significantly, a 1987 concept study highlighted
three collectors, Captain James Cook, Major Jasper Grant and Sir Roger Casement, to
showcase the ethnographic material. They were seen as ‘ideologically acceptable’ with a
‘clean record in the treatment of the locals and the way in which they collected’, and in the
case of Casement, demonstrated opposition to ‘British colonialism in favour of Irish
Nationalism’ (Hall Redman Associates 1987, 67). Financial constraints, however, meant that
the items remained in storage. It was only after 1997, when the Museum gained a larger
exhibition space with the move of the Art and Industry collections to the newly acquired
complex of Collins Barracks, that these ideas could be taken forward. The art of the Pacific
was shown in the Douglas Hyde gallery in 1978, in commemoration of Captain Cook’s
explorations. Loans to overseas museums included Cook voyage material to Artificial
curiosities: an exposition of native manufactures collected on the three Pacific voyages of
Captain James Cook, R.N. (Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Hawaii, 1978); Eleven gods
assembled: an exhibition of Hawaiian wooden images (Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum,
Hawaii, 1979); Patterns of power: early Great Lakes Indian art and the Jasper Grant
Collection (McMichael Canadian Collection, Ontario, 1984); and The spirit sings: artistic
traditions of Canada’s First Peoples (Glenbow Museum, Calgary, 1984), amongst others. The
1990 Te Ao Maori exhibition, curated by Stella Cherry of the NMI, started a process of
dialogue and reciprocity with indigenous specialists by drawing on the assistance of staff at
the National Museum of New Zealand, Wellington.

Phase IV: 1997–present

Today, the Museum is entering a fourth phase in terms of displaying the ethnographic
material and of investigating the collections’ multiple histories and meanings. Recognition
of the Irish role in the British Empire is a key element of this phase. While the isolation of
the ethnographic collection and the Museum’s nationalist emphasis on Ireland and Irish
culture have been at the expense of developing stronger connections to the current
multicultural population of Ireland, the collections are being revitalised with the acquisition
of contemporary diviner’s equipment from South Africa and recent material from Uganda.
Any additions to the collections remain donations, however, as there are no funds for
purchases. In 2007 it was announced that central government funding had been allocated
for a new wing of the Collins Barracks complex to house a permanent exhibition gallery of
ethnographic material, though the recession has delayed this for the foreseeable future.

Initial display considerations were to be reflective and intended to reassess the Irish
participation in, and reaction to, British imperialism, as well as the comparative nature of
the material. The role of the Museum as a national institution in the colonial and post‐
colonial world was also to be addressed. This has already been partially achieved in the
recent exhibition Soldiers and chiefs: the Irish at war at home and abroad, 1550–2001, with
the incorporation of ethnographic material taken as souvenirs and loot by Irish soldiers. The
objects are seen rather as message‐bearing entities, as the Museum moves away, both
physically and ideologically, from what Tim Barringer (1998, 11) termed a ‘three‐
dimensional Imperial archive’, becoming a forum ‘for confrontation, experimentation, and
debate’.57 The Museum aspires to illustrate the history of Ireland’s cultural heritage and her
role within different communities, to emphasise common themes and structures, and to
explore her artistic and industrial development. The military splendour of the Collins
Barracks complex, the former Royal Barracks, is a suitable setting for the display of the
ethnographic collections, as it is evocative of much of the material’s collection and journeys
to Ireland.

Conclusions
The acquisition and display of ethnographic material in Dublin have been considerably
influenced by external factors, as well as by internal pressures. The private societies and
Trinity College acquired travellers’ souvenirs and curios and used them to illustrate new
lands and cultures. While natural history specimens were used to teach about scientific
discoveries and the natural world, ethnographic material was regarded more as a curiosity
until the establishment of ethnography as a comparative discipline and the objects’ arrival
in the Science and Art Museum in 1877. Initially managed as an outpost of the Kensington
Science and Art Department, the Dublin Museum has adapted its roles along with its
changing names. Emphasising first public education within the United Kingdom, as the
Museum of Science and Art, it gradually moved towards a more Irish‐centred vision with an
archaeological focus as the National Museum of Science and Art, particularly under the
directorships of Count Plunkett and Adolf Mahr. Changes within the National Museum have
thus reflected rather than influenced the social and political situation in Ireland, and
material has been regarded or divided accordingly.

The majority of the nineteenth‐century ethnographic material is inseparably intertwined

with the colonial experience, but perceptions of its multiple meanings and messages have
depended on its audiences and the Museum’s priorities. Material from Africa, the Americas
and the Pacific was acquired as examples of ethnography, while Asian material was
classified more as decorative art. The division of this material between the Eastern Art and
Ethnographic collections and the separation of the Irish Folklife material into a distinct
collection reinforce this evolutionary element. Perceptions of the ethnographic material
gradually changed as Irish attitudes towards Britain also altered. While the material was
initially celebrated by the Ascendancy minority as evidence of Irish participation in an
advancing empire, it became a reflection of Ireland’s own colonial experiences. The
emphasis on acquiring Irish material culture after the 1928 Lithberg and 1947 Quane
reports, and a lack of resources, led to the neglect of the ethnographic collections, and
acquisition numbers gradually fell, becoming static after 1948. Irish rather than foreign
ethnography was to be actively collected, resulting in a second outpost of the National
Museum at Castlebar, Co. Mayo, in the form of the Country Life Museum.

The removal of the ethnographic material from display followed years of stringent budgets
and pressures on gallery space since the take‐over of Leinster House by the Dáil in 1922.
Disassociation with the material and its connections to a colonial past saw some objects
repatriated to foreign governments and the collections packed into crated storage. The last
decade has seen a renegotiated pride in an Irish past, both at home and abroad, which,
combined with the economic boom of the late 1990s, has led to re‐engagement with the
collected souvenirs of Irish men and women. Today the multiplicity of the ethnographic
collections, and their associated social and personal relationships, is starting to be
recognised. The National Museum celebrates both Irish and foreign ethnography and the
relationships of Ireland to other countries, with the potential to act as a forum for debate
and the exchange of ideas.

Notes

1. This article is the result of a paper read at the 2007 Irish Anthropology Association
conference, ‘The World in a Glass Case: Ethnographic Collections in Ireland’, held at Collins
Barracks, and I am grateful for the insightful and constructive comments of the editor,
Séamas Ó Síocháin, and the anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank the staff at the
NMI, particularly Raghnall O’Floinn, Brenda Malone and Orla Fitzpatrick, for their assistance
in accessing material and for perceptive suggestions.

2. The NMI holds c. 6,000 Asian objects, and less than 1,000 (15%) are located in the
Ethnographic Collection. The Asian collections have not been examined a part of this paper,
as the Museum, partly influenced by theories of social evolution, has been unsystematic in
its categorisation of Asian material, distinguishing between decorative and folk art, and
allocating the material unevenly between the Ethnographic and the Eastern Art collections,
and smaller type collections such as Ceramics and Arms and Armour.

3. Originally known as the ‘Dublin Society’, the prefix ‘Royal’ was adopted when King George
IV became patron on 29 June 1820.

4. Donors who sold material to various institutions, including the NMI, are well known and,
while several donors (such as Arthur Mahaffy and Constance Gordon Cumming) are known
to have gifted material to several institutions, it is likely that further research will identify
others.

5. Keith Jeffery and Nicholas Whyte both highlight the problematic nature of the term
‘Anglo‐Irish’, as their ‘Irishness’ was deeply felt, and follow J.C. Beckett’s (1976) use of
‘Ascendancy’ (Jeffery 1996, 3; Whyte 1997, 51).

6. In 2005 the British Museum acquired the North American Indian collections of Brian
Mullanphy, whose father was from Fermanagh, in the form of the Stoneyhurst–Mullanphy
collection from the Jesuit College of Stoneyhurst, Lancashire.
7. Several pieces of tourist art were collected in the 1930s by the Revd W.A. Lumley of the
Catholic Mission in Benin City.

8. Jeffery (1996, 106–7) suggests that these officers’ Irishness was often cultural as opposed
to Gaelic, and argues for their ability to hold various identities simultaneously. I am also
grateful to Brenda Malone of the National Museum of Ireland for our detailed discussions of
this tripartite identity and for access to her unpublished MA thesis, where she highlights a
separate Irish ‘national’ identity within a wider British one (Malone 1996). It should also be
noted that participation by regular troops in the British army did not necessarily mean an
adherence to the politics of Empire, as shown by the two Transvaal Irish Brigades who
fought on behalf of the Boers in 1899 and the mutiny of the Connaught Rangers in 1920.

9. Maori material was collected by Surgeon William H. Goode RN and Col. John Dwyer of the
14th (Buckinghamshire) Regiment and given to the RDS. Capt. George Meyler of the 57th
(Middlesex) Regiment also gathered material, later purchased by the National Museum.

10. These divisions are based on Crooke’s (2000) analysis of the Antiquities collections in
the National Museum of Ireland.

11. I am grateful to Amiria Henare for drawing my attention to the development of

ethnographic taxonomies and focusing my thoughts on the early classificatory systems of
museum displays. Henare highlights William Monkhouse’s typology of Maori cloaks from
the first Cook voyage and the museum catalogue of collector and dealer George Humphrey.
See also Henare’s discussion on the attempt to construct typologies for artificial curiosities
(Henare 2005, 63 and 71–2) and John Mack’s comments on the ontological linkage of
material exhibited in Montague House, 1761 (Mack 2005, 117).

12. Digby’s ‘The Naturalist’s Companion’ is held in the Mitchell Library, the State Library of
New South Wales, Australia.

13. Trinity College Registers, July 1777.

14. The private museum of William Hunter was donated to the University of Glasgow in
1781 and opened to the public in 1804; the University of Edinburgh’s Museum opened in
1697 (though the collections were mainly dispersed by 1765), whilst the Marischal Museum
at the University of Aberdeen opened in 1786.

15. The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, was founded
in 1884, the same year as the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
16. John Williamson started the voyage as third lieutenant on the Resolution, but
transferred in 1779 to the Discovery as first lieutenant, returning to the Resolution in 1780
after the death of Charles Clerke.

17. Trinity College Registers, 10 July, 1790.

18. Trinity College Registers, 17 March 1800, p. 347. Stokes had been suspended from 1798
to 1800 for his support of the United Irishmen (McDowell 1952, 67).

19. Proceedings of the Dublin Society (20 May 1800), 107.

20. Hibernian Journal, 9 January 1792. I am grateful to Mary Kelleher and Kieran Burns for
their assistance in identifying John Ellis and his museum.

21. Proceedings of the Dublin Society (22 April 1813), 151.

22. Proceedings of the Dublin Society (1813), 160.

23. Proceedings of the Dublin Society (7 Nov. 1816), 8.

24. Foucault 1970, quoted in Hooper‐Greenhill 1992, 17.

25. Societies such as the Society of Dublin (1806), the Iberno‐Celtic Society (1818), the Celtic
Society and the Ossianic Society (1853) began to be harnessed later in the century by the
political movement for reform.

26. Dublin Corporation 1811, 121.

27. Calendar and General Directory of the Science and Art Department for the year 1885:
being a supplement to the Thirty‐Second Report.

28. Crooke 2000, 105, noting Goodwin 1990.

29. Second Report of the Select Committee on Museums of the Science and Art Department
(1897), 209, 218.

30. National Museum of Science and Art, 1885, cited by Crooke (2000, 121).

31. Thirty‐Second Report of the Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on
Education (London, 1885), 279.

32. Report of the Director of the Science and Art Museum (Dublin, 1886), 361; Report of the
Director of the Science and Art Museum (Dublin, 1887), 294.
33. The considerable natural history collections of the RDS remained in the newly
established Natural History Museum.

34. I am indebted to Joshua Bell and Barry Craig for drawing my attention to this collection.

35. From 1880 Haddon was Professor of Zoology at the Royal College of Science, Dublin,
part of the Department of Science and Art, but he also worked as assistant naturalist at the
Science and Art Museum, cataloguing the collections. The British Museum acquired the bulk
of his collection, and duplicates were sold to other institutions in Dublin, Oxford and
Cambridge, partly a result of his need to finance the expedition.

36. King (1997, 147‐7) identified three coexistent paradigms in the display of ethnographic
material during the early nineteenth century: the eclectic cabinets of curios; pseudo‐
medieval displays of ethnographic and European weaponry; and the display of
contextualised material from specific geographic areas. It was the latter which was to
become the dominant form of display, and highlighted current theories of social evolution.

37. Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland Institutions of Science
and Art, Dublin, Report of the Director for the 15 months ending 31 March 1901 (Dublin,
1901), 8.

38. The collection was originally displayed in his home in Howth, near Dublin, and
purchased, after his death, from his sister, Rachel Mahaffy, in 1923.

39. Classen and Howes 2006, 199, citing T. Bennett 1995.

40. Two similar ‘Sacrobundi’ masks, probably acquired at the same time by Cecil Armitage,
are now in the British Museum and Wandsworth Museum.

41. Report of the Director of the Dublin Institutions of Science and Art (Dublin, 1910), 3.

42. Report of the Director of the Dublin Institutions of Science and Art (Dublin,

1906–7), 10.

43. Meyer 1905, cited in Crooke 2000, 127.

44. Reports from the Committees of Museums of the Science and Art Department, Report of
the Select Committee appointed to enquire into and report upon the administration and cost
of the Museums of the Science and Art Department (1897), XII, 221. (See comments by Col.
Plunkett.) Museums of Science and Art Department Minute by the Right Honourable the
Lords of the Committee of the Privy Council on Education on the 2nd Report from the Select
Committee (1898) on the Museums of the Science and Art Department (1898), XI, 111–17,
120–8. (See comments by Arthur Graves.)

45. Count Plunkett had earlier stood unsuccessfully for election as a Parnellite nationalist,
and was the founding editor of the nationalist paper Hibernia. Plunkett was the father of
Joseph Plunkett, one of the leaders executed for his role in the 1916 Rising. He lost his
position soon after this, as high‐ranking civil servants with nationalist sympathies were
considered problematic.

46. Report of the Director of the Dublin Institutions of Science and Art (Dublin, 1912), 1.

47. Robinson 1899, 29; cited by Crooke (2000, 131).

48. Sir Edmond Thompson in Robinson 1899, 4; cited by Crooke (2000, 131).

49. Plunkett in Robinson 1899, 35; cited by Crooke (2000, 131).

50. English scientists working in Ireland, such as Grenville Cole, head of the Geological
Survey, and Robert Scharff, keeper of Natural History and later acting director of the
Museum after Plunkett’s dismissal, later attempted with varying success to keep in or
return to Ireland Irish natural history and type specimens, rather than have them end up in
British institutions. See Whyte 1997, 56–61.

51. The photographs for blocks to illustrate Stanton’s guide to the New Zealand Collection
were being prepared and soon to be sent forward for printing, but this does not appear to
have happened. Report on the National Museum of Science and Art for the year 1920–21
(Dublin, 1921).

52. Karp 1991, 3, citing Cameron 1972, 197 and 201.

53. Letter from Rachel Mahaffy to Prof. Sir William Ridgeway, Cambridge University
Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, undated, but probably late April 1922.

54. Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction 1924, 2.

55. Saorstát Éireann 1931–2, 20.

56. Today, the definitions and scope of the term ‘ethnology’ are much wider. Both Anne
O’Dowd, assistant keeper of the Irish Folklife Division, and Ó Cadhla also use the modern
Irish term for folklore, béaloideas, and emphasise the links of the term ‘folklife’ to the
Swedish folkliv.

57. Karp 1991, 3, citing Cameron 1972, 197 and 201.

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