Mary Merrifield

The Victorian era is considered the golden age of natural history collecting. The pursuit of fauna and flora from around the planet was driven both by a desire to learn about nature, as well as a quest to prove oneself against the wilderness.

Phyllophora rubens

Victorians collected almost everything to do with the natural world. However, women were excluded from collecting most things by the rules of Victorian society, usually relegated to collecting plants. Some of these women took full advantage of a science that was acceptable for them to study, becoming leading authorities in botany. One of these women was Mary Philadelphia Merrifield.

Born Mary P. Watkins in Brompton, London on 18 April 1804, to the barrister Sir Charles Watkins, she married trainee barrister John Merrifield in 1827. After qualifying as a barrister, he moved to Brighton with his family to practice law.

Flustra Foliacea

Mary started her career in the academic community by translating and publishing the works of the 15^th century Italian painter Cennino Cennini. This work bought her to the attention of the Royal Commission on the Fine Arts, who employed her to research the history of painters materials and techniques. Assisted in her work by her sons Charles and Frederick, the research was published in book form in 1846 as the Art of Fresco Painting. It proved to be a very useful manual for artists and was reprinted as late as 1952.

Image of her book along with specimens

She wrote several more books on art and fashion, and was awarded a civil pension of £100 in 1857 for services to art and literature. After receiving this pension however, her interests shifted to the field of natural history, and she soon published a book entitled A Sketch of the Natural History of Brighton. Being perfectly cited by the sea, she became an authority in the study of seaweed, and was considered one of the leading algologists in Britain. She wrote many papers for scientific journals including the Journal of the Linnaean Society and the Annals of Botany, and continued to publish articles in the journal Nature until her death.   

Image of her book A Sketch of the Natural History of Brighton

During her last few years in Brighton, she helped to arrange the natural history galleries at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, all of which have now been relocated to the Booth Museum. She also learned Danish and Swedish so that she could keep up with botanical research from these countries, and she had a species of marine algae named after her.  

Following her husband’s death in 1877, she moved into her daughter’s home in Cambridge, and died on 4 January 1889. Her collection went to the Natural History department of the British Museum (now the Natural History Museum), but some items she had previously given to other colleagues are now housed at the Booth Museum. These are mostly seaweeds but include some other specimens as well. Several of these items will go on display at Horsham Museum in early 2012, as part of the Victorian Collectors exhibition produced by the Booth Museum. 

Lee Ismail, Curator of Natural Sciences

Arctic Objects in the World Art Collection

Jonathan King from the British Museum visited Brighton Museum & Art Gallery recently to help us learn more about the Arctic peoples’ objects in the World Art collection.

Jonathan King examining objects from the Arctic

These objects came from different sources and donors and were originally collected by European traders and sailors in the nineteenth – and early twentieth century; for example, Frederic William Lucas acquired many carved ivories, probably at auction.

Arctic peoples have lived in the regions of Northern Canada, Greenland and Alaska for 1,000s of years. Originally the people came from Siberia across the Bering land bridge, which once joined eastern Siberia with Alaska.

Traditionally the Arctic peoples were nomadic hunters and we have many weapons and tools, used for hunting whales, seals and caribou, in our collection along side sewing implements, domestic items, decorative pieces and animal carvings made from walrus and seal bones.

Jonathan supplied invaluable information about the objects, explaining and demonstrating how hunting tools were made and used.

Pipe detail

He also provided insight into the engravings that decorate objects such as this Siberian-type pipe from Alaska (above) on which a hunting scene is depicted. The feathers in the walrus’s and whale’s mouths are a motif used by Arctic artists to represent a mammal surfacing for air from the water.

The objects decorated with hunting scenes served as diaries of the hunters’ exploits. Other carved objects like this small figure on a sledge were used for trade or sold as souvenirs.

Man on sledge

The Arctic peoples made many animal carvings, which demonstrates a keen knowledge of animals and respect for their environment. Some carvings were made as toys for children.

Polar bear carving

They might also have been worn as amulets for protection on hunting trips. Many were also made for sale to European traders and sailors. The polar bear carving to the left is an example.

These cheek studs, from our collection, would be worn by Arctic hunters to mimic walrus tusks. The hunter would believe themselves to be imbued with a walrus spirit.

Cheek studs

Some of these Arctic objects will be displayed in the new World Stories gallery opening next year.

Lucy Faithful, Assistant Curator of World Art

Personality of the Month – Henry Willett (1823-1905)

Henry Willett, a founding father of Brighton Museum, was a man of great energy, enthusiasm and wide-ranging interests. 

Henry Willett pictured with a child, possibly his grand-child

He was born in 1823, the youngest of the eleven children of William Catt an energetic farmer and miller. His mother Hannah died shortly after his birth, so Henry was raised by his eldest sister, Elizabeth. She died in 1863 leaving her 8 surviving siblings £13,000 in her will provided they change their name from Catt to Willett. Three challenged this in a High Court case entitled ‘Catt’s Trusts’ and were able to benefit from her will but keep their name.  Henry was happy to adopt the name of Willett, perhaps to forestall teasing. In 1864, during an early foray into Brighton politics on behalf of the Liberal candidate, Professor Fawcett, he was mocked by the Tory press under the headline;

‘Mewsings on Cat-iline Willett’s Cat-asstrophe’.

Henry and his brothers and sisters were raised at Newhaven Tidemills, the largest watermill in Sussex, built on reclaimed land. He moved to Brighton in 1841 where he ran the West Street Brewery (another family business) and bought property throughout Sussex, particularly after his marriage to Frances Coombe, who came from a landed West-Sussex family. He was an astute businessman, investing in the Blackpool Electric Tramway, the Midland Railway and public utilities including electricity companies in Western Australia. In his will of 1905 he left an estate worth over £230,000.

At his family home in Upper North Street, Brighton he cultivated the acquaintance writers and thinkers such as John Ruskin, the American Oliver Wendell Holmes and Sir Augustus Franks, an influential curator at the British Museum who helped him to develop his ideas on collecting. Willett’s first collecting passion was for chalk fossils, which he excavated from the Sussex Downs. He also collected natural history specimens, archaeology, local products such as iron fire-backs and Sussex pottery as well as artefacts from other cultures.  Most of the important paintings he collected were later sold to international collections.

His most innovative collection was that of pottery and porcelain intending to illustrate British history, political social and cultural through the medium of ceramics. In pursuing his idea he acquired many mass-produced pieces that were disregarded at the time as well as rare ones, uniquely signed or decorated. They were first shown as a loan collection in the newly opened Brighton Free Museum in 1873, then enlarged and developed until it was presented as a gift to Brighton in 1903.  In his catalogue of 1899 he grouped the 2000 pieces in the collection, vessels, plaques, tiles and figures, under the twenty-three subject headings.