Sculpted Lions: The Mausoleum of Halikarnassos in View

Last week I attended and delivered a paper at the Displaying the British Museum: Past, Present and Future. My paper ('Stuffed Lions or Sculpted Lions? 1860 as a Year in Focus in display at the British Museum') was very much on the past, but while I was there, the focus shifted to the future. On Friday 21

February the architects Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture (LG—A) were announced as winning the competition to transform the western range (basically a mismash of adjoining rooms) of the British Museum. The competition 'ask' was to design a space for the sculptures and other material from the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, so my paper and that of the other speakers in the first panel was apposite. It gave me hope that may be the Parthenon sculptures will go back to Athens, leaving time and energy for a focus on the other wonderful material in the British Museum.

In my last blog I shared some of the romancing the stone when Mary Severn met Charles Thomas Newton while employed to draw the sculptures from the Mausoleum in 1859. My paper wasn't all on that but comprised new ideas about display of art, opening up access to people and the controversy about the sculptures that Newton had found in Turkey remaining in sheds outside the museum. Yet, it is fair to say that Mary Severn's sketches were the star act, so I'll share some of them and the accompanying text to mark the moment when the Mausoleum might finally get a modern gallery fit for the 21stC..

Drawing the Sculptures

In 1859 Newton urged the Museum's Principal Librarian Antony Panizzi to let an experienced architect make a restoration of the Mausoleum sculptures – that is to piece them all together for display – and called the Museum’s own man William Lucas a ‘great ass’. His exasperation can be sensed when he wrote ‘if the trustees had cared about the treasures they would have done this before’. He needed an artist to draw the sculptures for his lectures and publications. His friend George Scharf, who he had worked with previously, was too busy running the National Portrait Gallery so William S. W. Vaux introduced him to Mary Severn.

All the lions want to be immortalised by M.P. M.P. is lost in administration, she does not know who to choose, she thinks them all 'lovely'. Sketch by Mary Severn. M.S.

It was unusual for a woman to be commissioned to draw ancient sculpture and she needed a chaperon, which part her best friend and fellow artist Mary Palliser played and occasionally John Ruskin. Severn wrote to her sister Eleanor, who was in Paris with their mother, on 3 November 1859:

Ever since Mary {Palliser] has been here, a week, we have spent our days in the British Museum in the Halicarnassus Room. I had to do some drawings for Mr. Newton who has been lecturing at Oxford & Cambridge on this Mausoleum & at this moment that I am writing is at Windsor showing all his plans & diagrams to the Queen & Prince.

Mr Newton suggests to M.P. that the antique must be drawn from feeling the past with the hands. So M.P. makes a violent effort to reach the knee. M.S.

C.T.N. covers his statue of Artemnisia. He finds the public do not appreciate the fine expression of the face (not surprising, as there is no nose, not anything, but a chin.The drawings offer a different (and humorous) side of the sculptures early arrival and display at the British Museum. There was a serious point to these drawings though and they were used in both Newton’s publications on the Mausoleum (A History of Discoveries 1862 and Travels and Discoveries in 1865), as well as for his lectures.

On 14 November, Newton delivered a lecture using Severn’s drawings in the lecture theatre at the South Kensington Museum. The illustration below is by Mary’s brother Arthur. The Illustrated London News described the lecture in detail (probably from by the 'wretched reporter') and repeated Newton’s conclusion regarding the display of the sculptures in a glass shed as ‘dark and imperfectibly protected’ and that foreign nations ‘would accuse us of selfishly carrying away the most exquisite fragments of Greek art and not appreciating them afterwards’.

The situation of the sculptures was, for the moment, out of Newton’s control as was his relationship with Mary Severn. He proposed marriage at around the time of this lecture, as discussed in my former blog, but she could not marry him as she was the principal provider for her family.

Newton left for Rome in December 1859 and called at the Neues Museum in Berlin to visit Gustav Waagen, who had been a juror with him for the 1851 Great Exhibition. He commented that the museum was ‘very splendid’ but that the sculptures and vases were ‘still crowded in ill lit rooms’.

The Keeper of Antiquities, Edward Hawkins had indicated he wanted to retire in June, before the 1860 Parliamentary Report on the British Museum, and then the department would be restructured. It was not certain Newton would get a post but he had influential people behind him, as letters from G. F. Watts, John Ruskin, Gladstone, John Gibson etc attest. On 2 October 1860, Newton wrote to Panizzi that the Report was ‘a lame and impotent conclusion’ but that he must come to England in the spring ‘for I cannot defer my marriage any longer, we are both quite tired of waiting now, but Hawkins is quite capable of staying until Satan removes him.’

M.S. in a puzzle. How is she to make pictures of these lovely (?) antique heads! B.M.

The liberal leaning Morning Chronicle in an article on 19 September 1860, after the Parliamentary Report was published, found the museum too full and objects crushed into galleries. The journalist welcomed a cheap guidebook at six pence and 1 penny but felt the ‘information is given too scantily’ and barely an improvement on the one from 1845, unfavourably comparing the museum to ‘the Crystal Palace, the National Gallery and the Manchester Exhibition’. A couple of months later, the Athenaeum accused the trustees of forgetting the importance of the sculptures and their duty to the public when Austen Henry Layard found the Mausoleum sculptures in wooden sheds with rain pouring in and publicised the fact.

Arthur Severn imagines the Mausoleum as a feature at a ball / dinner party.

In January 1861, it was official that the Antiquities department was to be split into three under Newton, Vaux and Birch – reported in the ILN. The same month, Joseph Severn (Mary’s father) was appointed Consul to the Papal State of Rome, despite being 67 when the age of a Consul was meant to be 50 – again influential friends (Ruskin, Gladstone etc) intervened. Mary Severn and Charles Thomas Newton married in May 1861. The sculptures remained in situ until 1869, after Mary's death in 1866 and it was not until 1884 that Newton managed to display the sculptures from the Mausoleum in a permanent room. He retired in 1886.

Bloomsbury Hospital. B.M. applicants for poor relief.

Sources:

Images - Birkenhead Collection: Severn Family Archive.

Newton to Panizzi, August 19 1859, Correspondence of Sir A. Panizzi, Brit Lib. Add. Mss. 36720, f. 123.

Newton to Panizzi, August 19 1859, Correspondence of Sir A. Panizzi, Brit Lib. Add. Mss. 36720, f. 123.

Newton to Panizzi, September 22 1859, Correspondence of Sir A. Panizzi, Brit Lib. Add. Mss. 36720, f. 174.

Mary Severn to Eleanor Severn, Letter 3 November 1859, Birkenhead Collection – Severn Family

"Mr. Newton on the Budrum Sculptures." Illustrated London News, 19 Nov. 1859, p. 488. The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003, link.gale.com/apps/doc/HN3100052655/ILN? u=livuni&sid=bookmark-ILN. Accessed 1 Jan. 2025.

Newton to Panizzi, October 2 1860, Correspondence of Sir A. Panizzi, British Museum / BL* 1862-64. Add. Mss. 36722, f.*

"THE BRITISH MUSEUM." Morning Chronicle [1801], 19 Sept. 1860. British Library Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/BC3207263036/ BNCN?u=livuni&sid=bookmark-BNCN. Accessed 20 Jan. 2025.

The Athenaeum, (1860), December 8 1860, p. 794.

"The Department of Antiquities at the British Museum is to Be Divided into Three Sections, Which Will Be Placed under the Care of Mr. Birch, Mr. Newton, and Mr. Vaux Respectively." Illustrated London News, 26 Jan. 1861, p. 80. The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003, link.gale.com/apps/doc/ HN3100526593/ILN?u=livuni&sid=bookmark-ILN. Accessed 1 Jan. 2025.

Newton to Panizzi, October 25 1859, Correspondence of Sir A. Panizzi, Brit Lib. Add. Mss. 36720, f. 276

‘Sculptures from Halicarnassus and Cnidus’, Illustrated London News, Volume 37, October 19 1861, p. 401.