Booth Museum, Brighton

Booth Museum, Brighton

Booth Museum, Brighton

Booth Museum, Brighton

Eric Gill, a onetime Brighton resident, used to visit the museum when he was a child. Here is an exert from the biography ‘Eric Gill’ by Fiona MacCarthy:

There were many opportunities in Brighton for Ruskinian self-improvement. Just around the corner from the Gill’s, in Dyke road, stood the Booth Bird Museum (known in the Gill household as the birds’ museum, since the children imagined it belonging to the hundreds of stuffed birds displayed within it, Warbles and Buzzards and Bitterns).

The Booth museum was and still is an extraordinary monument to Victorian enthusiasm, the urge to collect and collate. Edward Booth, who formed the collection, was a wealthy man whose preoccupation with birds approached mania: he once kept a train under steam in Brighton station for a week waiting to rush him to the highlands as soon as his gillies had informed him that the white-tailed eagles were nesting.

(I had no idea what a ‘gillie’ was so I looked it up – here’s the definition from dictionary.com: ‘a male attendant or personal servant to a Highland chieftain.’)

I recently found out from the Brighton Prestonville blog the sad news that the opening hours were being reduced because of cuts in public spending, a situation that would be hard to revert. You can read more about the situation and find out how to help here.

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Related posts:

1. Museum of Everything
2. Holga Experiments
3. To Be Adored – fashion collection by Binbin McNiven

The collection is housed in what used to be a recording studio and the location sits very well with the objects and images, small rooms linked by smaller corridors opening into a larger room, filled floor to ceiling with the most obsessive imagery I’ve ever seen. The collection is selected by artists, musicians and writers but don’t let that spoli it, you might like David Byrne. Each curator has written a small text explaining their choices. Some of these are very annoying, some are better. Nick Cave managed to get to the nub of it for me with the text ‘Louis Wain is my favourite painter ever’. Fair enough eh?

There are some truly startling paintings, illustrations and installations on view here, the product of a persons obsessions and compulsions. This is not art made for the consideration by others, this is true art, made because the artist has no other choice but to get it out of their head. Highlights for me were the Aleksander P Lobanov collection and the Henry Darger panels, a twisted Norman Rockwell of adolescence and fear.

Get up there and see it, don’t think it’s going to be on for much longer.

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