Items17The creator’s order
  1. 1Elias AshmoleElias AshmoleBorn 23 May 1617Elias Ashmole acquired the cabinet of curiosities assembled by the gardeners John Tradescant the elder and younger, in circumstances the Tradescant family contested, and gave it with his own collection to the University of Oxford. The Ashmolean Museum opened in 1683, often called Britain's first…0i
  2. 2Hans SloaneHans SloaneBorn 16 Apr 1660Hans Sloane, a physician whose fortune partly came from Jamaican plantations worked by enslaved people, gathered about 71,000 books, specimens, coins and objects. At his death in 1753 he offered them to the nation for a fraction of their value, and Parliament created the British Museum to house…0i
  3. 3Thomas JeffersonThomas JeffersonBorn 13 Apr 1743After British troops burnt the Library of Congress in 1814, Thomas Jefferson sold Congress his personal library of 6,487 books in 1815, organised by his own subject system. It more than doubled the library's size and widened its scope beyond law and politics. A later fire destroyed much of it, and…0i
  4. 4Pavel TretyakovPavel TretyakovBorn 27 Dec 1832Pavel Tretyakov, a Moscow textile merchant, spent decades buying Russian paintings directly from living artists, including Repin and Perov, specifically to create a national collection. In 1892 he gave his gallery and nearly 2,000 works to the city of Moscow. The State Tretyakov Gallery remains the…0i
  5. 5Augustus Pitt RiversAugustus Pitt RiversBorn 14 Apr 1827Augustus Pitt Rivers, an army officer interested in how weapons and tools developed, collected tens of thousands of objects from around the world and arranged them by type rather than by place. He gave the collection to the University of Oxford in 1884, founding the Pitt Rivers Museum, whose…0i
  6. 6Henry TateHenry TateBorn 11 Mar 1819Henry Tate, a sugar refiner who made his fortune partly with sugar cubes, collected contemporary British paintings, including Millais's Ophelia. He offered them to the nation and paid for a gallery at Millbank, which opened in 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art, now Tate Britain. The four…0i
  7. 7Isabella Stewart GardnerIsabella Stewart GardnerBorn 14 Apr 1840Isabella Stewart Gardner built a Venetian-style palazzo in Boston to display her paintings, including works by Titian, Rembrandt and Vermeer, advised by the young art historian Bernard Berenson. It opened to the public in 1903, and her will required the arrangement to remain unchanged. When…0i
  8. 8Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron RothschildWalter Rothschild, 2nd Baron RothschildWalter Rothschild, heir to the banking family, was obsessed with zoology from childhood and opened his own natural history museum at Tring in Hertfordshire in 1892, employing curators who described thousands of new species. He bequeathed the museum to the British Museum on his death in 1937. It is…0i
  9. 9Arturo Alfonso SchomburgArturo Alfonso SchomburgArturo Alfonso Schomburg, a Puerto Rican-born historian who worked as a bank clerk in New York, spent decades collecting books, manuscripts and art documenting the history of people of African descent, to refute claims that Black people had no history. In 1926 the New York Public Library bought his…0
  10. 10Henry Clay FrickHenry Clay FrickBorn 19 Dec 1849Henry Clay Frick, the steel and coke magnate notorious for his role in the violent Homestead strike of 1892, assembled old master paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt and Holbein in his Fifth Avenue mansion. He left the house and collection to become a public museum, which opened in 1935 after his…0i