Adrienne L. Kaeppler
Holophusicon The Leverian Museum
295 x 245mm, Perfect bound soft cover, 308pp, colour illustrations.
Book of the Month September 2011
Australian: $80 (Approx. US $83, Euro €63)
ISBN 9783981162042
Worldwide 7 - 10 days, Australia 3 - 7 business days
About the Book
This is a wonderful book, whole-heartedly recommended to all our customers; published by a small scholarly press it is not widely available. A very long time coming, it represents the lifework of everyone's favourite ethnographer, Adrienne Kaeppler of the Smithsonian. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Cook, collecting, the Pacific, ethnography, museumology, Polynesian arts, the late eighteenth century, the circle of Joseph Banks, the artist Sarah Stone, Sir Ashton Lever, English eccentricity, the list could go on for pages... Adrienne Kaeppler is one of the world's great experts on the natural history and ethnographic artefacts collected on the Pacific voyages of Captain Cook, and she recently curated the magnificent international exhibition on Captain Cook at Bonn in Germany. Forty years ago, anthropologist Adrienne Kaeppler was working at Bishop Museum when she was challenged by a curatorial puzzle that launched her into a lifelong quest to determine the present-day whereabouts and backstories of the artifacts of the Holophusicon, perhaps the most important museum in Europe in the late eighteenth century. In her new book, Holophusicon, the Leverian Museum: An Eighteenth-Century English Institution of Science, Curiosity, and Art Kaeppler traces the fascinating history of the institution itself and its owner, Sir Ashton Lever, incorporating hundreds of period illustrations and detailed descriptions. Her extensive scholarly investigation has resulted in a comprehensive catalogue that illuminates the breadth and historical importance of the Leverian collections, which included some of the best collections from the voyages of Captain James Cook. Now curator of Oceanic Ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., Kaeppler first became interested in Ashton Lever in 1971 when she was at the Bishop Museum researching Tongan material culture. To complete her research, she embarked on her first trip to visit European museums with early collections of objects from the Kingdom of Tonga. Kaeppler first encountered the Cook-voyage collection at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna, and she was surprised to find that this and all other museum collections she visited at that time didn't distinguish Tongan objects from other Polynesian objects but simply combined them under the category of Otaheite. Kaeppler began identifying the objects, uncovering histories of many that had once been among the extraordinary collections of the Holophusicon, also known as the Leverian Museum. In her book, Kaeppler recounts the expansion of the Leverian collection from its first exhibition at Lever's family home at Alkrington Hall near Manchester, England. Lever's collection proved so popular that in 1774 Lever decided to move it to Leicester House in London. The Holophusicon (a name Lever invented to describe his endeavor to showcase all of nature, "Holo" meaning whole, "phusikon" natural) was privately funded and it grew impressively, rivaling the government-supported British Museum. Although the Holophusicon lacked the support of the scientific establishment, scientists and laypersons viewed its collections. Lever made information more accessible by labeling each object so that visitors didn't need guidebooks. Natural and cultural oddities were glimpses of faraway lands that included areas of the Pacific still unbeknownst to most Europeans. Three-quarters of the exhibition were objects from the natural world, such as fossils, shells, minerals, birds, insects, and other various forms. Ethnographic exhibits included objects from the second and third voyages of Captain James Cook. Artist Sarah Stone (ca. 1760-1844) documented much of the collections in four watercolor sketchbooks, two of which are in the Bishop Museum Archives. In 1968, Bishop Museum Press published its two sketchbooks as Art and Artifacts of the 18th Century by Ronald and Maryanne Force, and Kaeppler used this as a reference to identify objects. Though well attended, the Holophusicon couldn't support itself. By 1786, Lever exhausted his financial resources and the entire collection was sold by lottery. In 1806, the exhibition's 7,000 lots were sold at auction and scattered around the world. To Kaeppler, this was an irresistible mystery. What had become of the objects that had been in the Holophusicon's immense collection? While some objects still elude her and her search continues, Kaeppler has located and documented thousands of objects that she has placed into a Holophusicon in book form, reconstructed by her perseverance through four decades.