THE GILDED CANOPY - A SESSION WITH THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM
By Sandra Knapp | 26 August 2020
The building housing the collections and exhibitions of the Natural History Museum in London is a collection itself. Highly decorated throughout with motifs and casts of animals and plants, it has been likened to a cathedral to natural history. When it opened in 1881, the press ridiculed the building as garish and over-decorated...more akin to a pleasure garden than to a sober national museum. Throughout the terracotta facings on the building, inside and out, the architect Alfred Waterhouse placed images of animals – both living and extinct – on most of the available surface. Plants provide the decorative elements everywhere except the ceilings – where they are the stars of the show. The vaulted ceilings of the main hall are composed of panels illustrating a wide variety of plants from all over the world. Why these plants? Where did the images come from? What do they say about the world at the time the Museum in London was built? Plants were the basis of economies in the 19 th century, and the ceilings tell some of their stories, but also allow us to explore how the world has changed since the days the Museum first opened its doors to the public.
About the Speaker
Sandy Knapp is botanist who is a specialist on the taxonomy and evolution of the nightshade family, Solanaceae, and she has spent much time in the field collecting plants, mostly in South America. She works at the Natural History Museum, London, where she arrived in 1992 to manage the international project Flora Mesoamericana - a synoptic Spanish-language inventory of the approximately 18,000 species of plants of southern Mexico and the isthmus of Central America. She is the author of several popular books on the history of science and botanical exploration, including the award-winning Potted Histories (2004), and more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers. She is actively involved in promoting the role of taxonomy and the importance of science worldwide. Sandy is a trustee of several conservation and scientific organisations, and in May 2018 took office as President of the Linnean Society of London.
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