Curiouser and curiouser | 9 July 2015

Art is not jewellery. Its value does not reside in the price of the materials from which it is made. After all, the cost of the pigment, oil and cloth that made up a Rembrandt was negligible. It’s what he did with them that counts. On the other hand, spectacular works of art can be made from gold and gems, as is clear from some — if not all — of the items displayed in the new installation of the Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum. ‘As soon as the swallows made their appearance,’ Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild wrote in his memoir Bric-à-Brac, ‘my father’s curiosities were packed and stored away in a strong room.’ It was the young Ferdinand’s privilege to help pack these objects. ‘Merely to touch them,’ he recalled, ‘sent a thrill of delight through my small frame.’

Those items belonging to Baron Anselm von Rothschild (1803–74), plus others amassed by Ferdinand himself (1839–98), are now sumptuously lit and housed in a new gallery designed by the architects Stanton Williams.