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Ulster Museum
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The Ulster Museum is located in the Botanical Gardens in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and has around 8,000 square metres of public display space, featuring material from the collections of Fine Art and Applied Art, Archaeology, Ethnography, Treasures from the Spanish Armada, Local History, Numismatics, Industrial Archaeology, Botany, Zoology and Geology. It is the largest museum in Northern Ireland, and one of three national museums of Northern Ireland.
The museum is currently closed until 2009 for refurbishment.
Museum was founded as the Belfast Natural History Society in 1821 and began exhibiting in 1833.
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Encyclopedia
The Ulster Museum is located in the Botanical Gardens in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and has around 8,000 square metres of public display space, featuring material from the collections of Fine Art and Applied Art, Archaeology, Ethnography, Treasures from the Spanish Armada, Local History, Numismatics, Industrial Archaeology, Botany, Zoology and Geology. It is the largest museum in Northern Ireland, and one of three national museums of Northern Ireland.
The museum is currently closed until 2009 for refurbishment.
History
The Museum was founded as the Belfast Natural History Society in 1821 and began exhibiting in 1833. It has included an art gallery since 1890. Originally called the Belfast Municipal Museum and Art Gallery, in 1929, it museum moved to its present location. The new building was designed by James Cumming Wynne.
In 1962, courtesy of the Museum Act (Northern Ireland) 1961, it was renamed as the Ulster Museum and was formally recognised as a national museum. A major extension by Francis Pym was begun in 1962 and opened in 1964. It is in the Brutalist style, praised by David Evans for the “almost barbaric power of its great cubic projections and cantilevers brooding over the conifers of the botanic gardens like a mastodon”.
Since the 1940s, the Ulster Museum has built up very good collection of art by modern Irish, and particularly Northern Irish, artists.
In 1998, the Ulster Museum, which includes Armagh County Museum, merged with the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum and the Ulster-American Folk Park to form the National Museums and Galleries of Northern Ireland.
In July 2005, a £12m refurbishment of the museum was announced, with funding coming from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure. In October 2006 the museum closed its doors until 2009, to allow for the refurbishment work.
Illustrations of historic interest will be found as nos 183 and 237 in Larmour,P. 1987. The redevelopment proposals have drawn criticism from many significant figures in the architectural community, who feel the character of the Modernist extension will be irrevocably lost.
Exhibits
The Ulster Museum contains important collections of birds, Irish mammals, insects, molluscs, marine invertebrates, flowering plants, algae and lichens, as well as an archive of books and manuscripts relating to Irish natural history. The museum also maintains a natural history website named Habitas. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s it had a permanent exhibition on dinosaurs which has since been scaled back considerably. There is also a collection of rocks, minerals and fossils.
List of zoological collections
Historic
Recent
Important Individual Specimens
Wildlife art
The Zoology Department also maintains collections of Wildlife Art. Works by
Peter Scott, Joseph Wolf, Eric Ennion, John Gerrard Keulemans, Roger Tory Peterson, Charles Tunnicliffe, Robert Gillmor and Archibald Thorburn are included. Illustrated works held by the Zoology Department include British Entomology - being illustrations and descriptions of the genera of insects found in Great Britain and Ireland — a classic work of entomology by John Curtis and Niccolò Gualtieri's Index Testarum Conchyliorum, quae adservantur in Museo Nicolai Gualtieri 1742.
The Herbarium (BEL)
The herbarium in the Ulster Museum (BEL), is based on specimens from Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society (founded in 1821); the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club (founded in 1863); the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery (formed 1905) and the herbarium (BFT) of the Botany Departmeny of Queen's University, Belfast acquired in 1968. In total the number of specimens is more than 100,000. Although specimens from Northern Ireland are well represented, specimens from elsewhere in the world have been acquired by donation, exchange and purchase. All branches of the world's flora are represented: algae, lichens, fungi, mosses and pteridophytes (ferns), conifers and angiosperms. Little information about the Irish flora before 1830 is available, the oldest specimen in the Ulster Museum is an alga: Batrachospermum moniliforme (BEL: F41) collected in 1798 by John Templeton, other specimens of Batrachospermum, originally incorrectly identified as Thorea ramoissima were collected by John Templeton in 1815 from a "boghole" in Co. Donegal (BEL:F42 - F47). It was originally published by Harvey in 1841.
List of some of the collectors
- S.A.Bennett (1843 — 1929)
- Corrie Denew Chase (1878 — 1965). (vascular plants and algae) — his herbarium of about 4,000 sheets was passed to Methodist College Belfast who passed it to the museum in 1970.
- John Cocks (1787 — 1861) (algae)
- Thomas Hughes Corry (1859 — 1883) (vascular plants).
- A. Fenton (A.F-G.Fenton) (lichens)
- M.Foslie (algae)
- Paul Hackney (1945 — ) (vascular plants and mosses)
- William Henry Harvey (1811 — 1866) (algae).
- George Crawford Hyndman (1796 — 1867) (algae).
- Frederick Hugh Woodhams Kerr (1885 — 1958) (vascular plants)
- Mary Patriria Happer Kertland (1901 — 1991) (vascular plants)
- William McCalla (c.1814 — 1849) (algae).
- Osborne Morton (1945 — ) (lichens and algae)
- Robert Lloyd Praeger (1865 — 1953) (vascular plants)
- Arthur Wilson Stelfox (1883 — 1972) (vascular plants)
- Samuel Alexander Stewart (1826 — 1910) (vascular plants)
- John Templeton (Botanist) John Templeton (1766 — 1825) (algae).
- William Thompson (1805 — 1852) (algae).
- Sylvanus Wear (1858 — 1920) (vascular plants and algae)
- Coslett Herbert Waddell (1858 — 1919) (vascular plants, bryophytes and algae).
1960s Art
The collection contains works by:
Past Art Exhibitions
During the 1970s and 1980s, the favourite exhibit of every child in Ulster was the museum's geological machine. This was a large map of Ireland (approximately 6 feet tall), covered with a mosiac of little tiles (each about 1 centimetre square). Inside each tile was appropriately coloured bulb, reflecting the geological era of rock deposits there. A control panel beneath the map had buttons for each era. Pressing an era's button would cause the corresponding mosiac tiles in the map to light up. The most rubbish era was Permian, with only one little pink tile; the best was Carboniferous, which would light up about two-thirds of Ireland with a dazzling electric blue glow. In an act of gross cultural sabotage, the museum decided to remove the machine at the end of the 20th century, and throw it in a skip.
Partial List
Ethnographic Collections
Girona
The museum acquired Armada artefacts from the Galleass Girona (ship) in 1971.
Renovation Programme
The Ulster Museum is now closed to the public for renovation, this will take about three years and cost about £12m. Its character will be dramatically changed. Meanwhile all the specimens are lodged in an outside store. Books and journals, not regularly required, have been sent to an archive store and temporary buildings have been erected at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Cultra, to house the staff while the building is being renovated. The building work is now almost complete and the new displays are being constructed (Feb 2009).
While the museum is closed, it is organising an extensive programme of travelling exhibitions around Northern Ireland, and information on the Ulster Museum's collections is available on its website.
See also
Bibliography
- Hackney, P. 1972. Notes on the vascular plant herbarium of the Ulster Museum. Ir. Nat. J. 17: 230 - 233.
- Hackney, P. 1980. Some early nineteenth century herbaria in Belfast. 20: 114 - 119.
- Hackney, P. 1981. British vascular plant collection of the Ulster Museum. Biology Curators' Group. 2: 2 - 3.
- Nesbitt, N. 1979. A Museum in Belfast. Ulster Museum.
- McMillan, N.F. and Morton, O. 1979. A Victorian album of algae from the north of Ireland with specimens collected by William Sawers. Ir. Nat. J. 19: 384 - 387.
- Morton, O. 1977a. A note on W.H.Harvey's algae in the Ulster Museum. Ir. Nat. J. 18: 26.
- Morton, O. 1977b. Sylvanus Wear's algal collection in the Ulster Museum. Ir. Nat. J. 19: 92 - 93.
- Morton, O. 1980. Three algal collections in the Ulster Museum herbarium. Ir. Nat. J. 20: 33 - 37.
- Morton, O. 1981a. Algae in Biology Curators Group Newsletter. 3: 12 - 13.
- Morton, O. 1981b American algae collected by W.H.Harvey and others, in the Ulster Museum Herbarium. Taxon 30: 867 - 868.
- Morton, O. 1994. Marine Algae of Northern Ireland. Ulster Museum, Belfast. ISBN 0 900761 28 8
- Praeger, R.L. 1949. Some Irish Naturalist.
Further reading
- Deane, C.Douglas 1983. The Old Museum. in The Ulster Countryside. Century Books, The Universities Press (Belfast) Ltd. ISBN 0 903152177
External links
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