A 155-year-old drawing of Queen Victoria, a navigational plane laptop and a jaw fragment of a reptile that lived greater than 200 million years in the past are amongst a number of the 1,700 objects lacking from museums in England.
The National Portrait Gallery in London reported it had 45 “not located items”, however insisted they aren’t lacking or stolen.
Between 2007 and 2022, a drawing of Queen Victoria from 1869, a mid-Nineteenth century engraving of King John granting the Magna Carta, a bronze sculpture of painter Thomas Stothard, and a 1947 destructive picture of the marriage of the late Queen to the Duke of Edinburgh, have been recorded as “not found”.
The gallery, which reopened in 2023, stated it nonetheless wants to finish searches for objects following a three-year refurbishment and objects recorded as unlocated are solely 0.02% of its assortment of 12,700 portraits and 164,000 photographs.
Most of the unlocated objects are photographic negatives which have already been digitally processed and can be found on the gallery’s on-line database, the museum stated.
The findings from Freedom of Information requests to museums and galleries receiving public cash comes after a member of workers on the British Museum was sacked in August after jewelry and gems from its assortment have been discovered to be lacking, stolen or broken.
Here are a number of the different museums which have disclosed lacking objects:
Victoria and Albert Museum
The world’s largest museum of utilized arts and design reported 180 lacking artefacts together with oil and watercolour work, a shadow puppet, false moustaches, varied drawings, underpants, stockings and a mousetrap.
A V&A spokeswoman stated the museum takes the safety of nationwide collections “very seriously” and “regularly reviews our security and collection management procedures”.
“This does not mean these objects have been stolen or lost, it might mean for example that a catalogue entry has not been updated after a collection move. Items are regularly recovered as a result of this process,” they added.
Royal Museums Greenwich
The Royal Museums, which manages the National Maritime Museum, Queen’s House, the Royal Observatory, Greenwich and Cutty Sark in east London, disclosed that round 245 objects can’t be discovered.
Among the lacking objects are a navigational plane laptop, a gun-sighting telescope, a cannonball, charts, liquid compasses, an Act of Parliament and an Altazimuth circle – which can be utilized for holding telescopes.
The museum stated “ghost entries, the result of data transfer from more primitive databases, incorrect documentation or human error in the past” may very well be the reason for this.
It has discovered 560 objects since 2008 through audits.
National History Museum
The museum in Kensington stated a jaw fragment of a Late Triassic reptile courting greater than 200 million years, the Diphydontosaurus, was famous as misplaced throughout a mortgage in 2019 and the following yr greater than 180 varied fish have been recorded as misplaced and a crocodile tooth was found stolen in 2020.
Other objects like feathers, muscle and liver from short-tailed shearwater birds and fairy prions from Australia have been destroyed because of improper preservation and it’s unclear what number of samples have been misplaced.
A Natural History Museum spokesman stated: “We take the security of our collection very seriously, so over the last 20 years we’ve had just 23 instances of lost or missing items from a collection of 80 million, limited to small things like teeth, fish and frozen animal tissue.”
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Science Museum
The group disclosed that two mannequin steam trains, a King George V and a British Railways Standard 4MT class, have been reported as stolen to police in 2014.
It additionally recorded a Nineteen Sixties mannequin of a deep-sea remark chamber, a diver’s watertight torch, a resuscitating equipment and a Nineteenth century portrait of Joseph Marie Jacquard as lacking.
A spokesman for the Science Museum Group, which homes 425,000 objects throughout its venues and centres, stated it has begun placing barcodes on artefacts to trace their areas and hold them protected.
Imperial War Museum
More than 550 objects, made up of ship camouflage drawings, British Army officer’s personal papers, a calendar with {a photograph} of former Iraq chief Saddam Hussein and foreign money notes, have been disclosed by the Imperial War Museum when requested about lacking objects.
A museum spokesman stated the artefacts dated earlier than their present collections administration techniques have been in place and have been additionally “typically low-value, mass-produced items”.
Royal Armouries
The museum within the Tower of London devoted to arms and armour disclosed in November {that a} Nineteenth century cannon from its assortment was stolen from a distant and off-site location.
It was claimed to be a steel theft, which means the cannon was thought to have been taken for its scrap worth, relatively than stolen as a “collection object”, in response to the physique.
A pair of mounted sword bayonets, value £500, additionally disappeared whereas on mortgage from the museum and cops have been known as, and because of this, different elements of the physique’s assortment have been recalled.
Source: information.sky.com”