ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Beauty Classified - The Hopetoun Walker Collection of Decorative Stone

• In Event: UNEARTHED I: The Many Lives of Res inanimatae

English Abstract

In 1785, the Reverend John Walker (1731–1803), newly appointed professor of natural history and keeper of the Natural History Museum at the University of Edinburgh, received an attractive suite of 140 slabs of decorative stones from James Hope, 3rd Earl of Hopetoun. The Earl’s father had collected these slabs—consisting of marbles from contemporary and antiques sources, travertine/alabaster, and other lithologies—as a young man on his Grand Tour in Rome. While James Hope aimed to cement his ties of patronage with the nascent Royal Society of Edinburgh and the university, Walker used the Hopetoun marbles to test his classification skills and to improve the didactic standing of the museum. Walker was a follower of Linnaeus’ classification system, though he applied it in an idiosyncratic way, assigning binomial designations of genus, species, and variety to the slabs according to geological, ornamental, and historical criteria. With the survival of 116 specimens of the Hopetoun-Walker collection, now in the National Museum of Scotland is an exceptionally important collection, historians of science have a rare opportunity to study an early rock and mineral ("fossil") classification system by examining the material objects themselves. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines expertise in geology, the history of art, and the history of science, this paper presents Walker’s system of classification and compares it with other contemporary collections of decorative stones."

Author

• Rene Winkler