Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Illustrations vii
4. Introduction: Museums and Biographies – Telling Stories about People, Things and Relationships 1
5. Individual Biography and Museum History
6. 1 A Show of Generosity: Donations and the Intimacy of Display in the ‘Cabinet des médailles et antiques’ in Paris from 1830 to 1930 13
7. 2 Introducing Mr Moderna Museet: Pontus Hultén and Sweden’s Museum of Modern Art 29
8. 3 Sydney Pavière and the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston 45
9. Problematising Individuals’ Biographies
10. 4 ‘His Best Successor’: Lady Eastlake and the National Gallery 61
11. 5 Women, Museums and the Problem of Biography 75
12. 6 A Curatocracy: Who and What is a V&A Curator? 87
13. Institutional Biographies
14. 7 Significant Lives: Telling Stories of Museum Architecture 103
15. 8 Schinkel’s Museums: Collecting and Displaying Architecture in Berlin, 1844–1933 119
16. 9 Personifying the Museum: Incorporation and Biography in American Museum History 133
17. 10 Making an Exhibition of Ourselves 145
18. 11 Institutional Autobiography and the Architecture of the Art Museum: Restoration and Remembering at the National Gallery in the 1980s 157
19. Object Biographies
20. 12 Classifying China: Shifting Interpretations of Buddhist Bronzes in Liverpool Museum, 1867–1997 173
21. 13 ‘Dressed like an Amazon’: The Transatlantic Trajectory of a Red Feather Coat1 187
22. 14 Individual, Collective and Institutional Biographies: The Beasley Collection of Pacific Artefacts 201
23. 15 Sculptural Biographies in an Anthropological Collection: Mrs Milward’s Indian ‘Types’ 215
24. Museums as Biography
25. 16 Houses and Things: Literary House Museums as Collective Biography 231
26. 17 ‘Keepers of the Flame’: Biography, Science and Personality in the Museum 247
27. 18 National History as Biography: Alexandre Lenoir’s Museum of French Monuments 265
28. Museums as Autobiography
29. 19 Autobiographical Museums 279
30. 20 Who is History? The Use of Autobiographical Accounts in History Museums 295
31. 21 Community Biographies: Character, Rationale and Significance 309
32. The Homunculus and the Pantograph, or Narcissus at the Met 321
33. List of Contributors 327
34. Index 331