Life, death, and everything in-between

Ross McFarlane works at the Wellcome Collection, a museum library in London with one of the world’s largest collections of objects. The collection was created from an estimated 1,000,000 objects collected by Henry Wellcome during his lifetime, mostly from 1890 to 1930. It is also a collection that is being added to over time.

Could you give a sense of what an incredible collector Henry Wellcome was? When I hear his name, I think of that scene at the beginning of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane with all the amazing loot piled up that he’s collected from around the world. The camera pans and there’s just thousands and thousands of objects.

Yes, that is such an interesting way to think of Wellcome; it’s a similar world and it’s a similar scale of collecting to Kane. To give you a sense of the scale of what he did, as a private individual, by the time he died in 1936, it is estimated that his collection numbered around a million objects. For a sense of scale, in the 1920s and 1930s, the size of the British Museum or the size of the Louvre would have been about two hundred thousand objects. So, you’ve got somebody who within forty years collected almost on an industrial scale and surpassed centuries’ worth of collecting by major European museums. So, there’s that sense of a private individual, akin to what you were saying with the comparison to Kane in Orson Welles’s film or even to William Randolph Hearst and the other wealthy American collectors of that time, who were amassing a private collection. He did have a theme behind what he was trying to do and what he was trying to amass. That theme developed over time as well, but there does seem to be an order and rationality to what he was