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ART on view 82 The Cuming Museum A Recovering Treasure FIG. 1 (top): Drawing by Henry Cuming of the interior of the Cumings’ home at 3 Dean’s Row, Walworth Road, South London. Courtesy of the Cuming Museum. FIG. 2 (inset): Portrait of Richard Cuming in the uniform of the Surrey Volunteers, in which he served during the Napoleonic wars, by his brother, John Brompton Cuming, c. 1810. Courtesy of the Cuming Museum. In one of the less glamorous neighborhoods of South London, unknown to the vast majority of Londoners, even to those living in the vicinity, a remarkable early nineteenth century collection survives to this day. The collection was typical of those formed by many amateur connoisseur collectors of the early nineteenth century, but while the vast majority of these have long since been dispersed, the Cuming Collection remains today, still in the part of the city where its founders once lived. The Cuming Collection was formed by Richard Cuming (1777–1870) and his youngest son, Henry Syer Cuming (1817–1902). Richard’s father moved to London from the West Country in 1760 and, at least in part as the result of his marriage to a wealthy widow, became a man of considerable means. Richard himself (fi g. 2) was later the benefi ciary of a number of inheritances on his mother’s side, which enabled him to devote his life to his interest in several scientifi c disciplines (he was a member of the Aurelian Society and the Lambeth Chemical Society) and his passion for collecting. By Tim Teuten The Cumings lived on Dean’s Row in Walworth, just a short distance from the Leverian Museum’s fi nal home in Albion Place, at the south end of Blackfriars Bridge. This museum had been founded by Sir Ashton Lever but was won by James Parkinson in a 1786 lottery after fi nancial diffi culties forced Lever to sell it. The collection contained vast numbers of natural history specimens and a large quantity of ethnographic objects. The majority of those from the Pacifi c and the Northwest Coast of North America had been collected on the second and third voyages of Captain Cook. Parkinson disposed of the contents of the Leverian Museum at auction in 1806 in a sixty-fi ve-day sale, and the young Richard Cuming bought fi fty-seven of the more than seven thousand lots. The majority of his purchases were natural history specimens, but they included a small number of ethnographic objects: lot 6293, “pouch and two belts of North American Indian,” and lot 6252, a “scarlet and white feather helmet, and two daggers, Sandwich Isles.” The headdress is almost certainly one illustrated by Sar-


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