The British Museum in 1900

In Great Russell Street was the vast British Museum itself.

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As a building, it was one of the few in London of which a satisfactory view could be had.

Its frontage was undeniably good and imposing, of Grecian-Ionic style, with a noble entrance and colonnade-portico of great columns five feet in diameter.

Throughout, it gave an impression of space, unexpected in crowded Bloomsbury, and was cool in summer and warm in winter.

Its contents were bewildering in their variety: Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities, Oriental antiquities, British and medieval antiquities and ethnography, medals and coins of priceless value, the famous Elgin marbles, the Assyrian collection from Nineveh, etc., the Grenville Library, the Royal Library with its exquisite specimens of the bookbinder's art, and the Manuscript room with its invaluable MSS., royal and other autographs, charters, etc.

In the first-named library, approached direct from the entrance-hall, were cases containing ancient illuminated volumes, missals, etc., glowing with gold and colour as vivid as when fresh from the hands of the monks in pre-Reformation days.

But the crowning glory of the Museum was the unrivalled Waddesdon collection (the bequest of the late Baron Ferdinand Rothschild), arranged in a separate room on the first floor.

It contained goldsmith's and silversmith's work of various styles and periods, of cinquecento jewellery, Limoges enamels, Venetian glass, wood-carvings, and antiquities formerly displayed at Waddesdon Manor, where the rest of the late Baron Rothschild's collection - English, French, and Dutch pictures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and French furniture of the eighteenth - were still preserved.

It afforded a splendid illustration of the art industries of the goldsmith and silversmith, the jeweller, the enameller, the glass-blower, the armourer, and the wood-carver during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

Next: Literary, Artistic and Scientific London in 1900: Libraries