The Hunterian, University of Glasgow

• This book is part of the Director’s Choice Series and is a personal and engaging guide with a unique approach to the works in Scotland’s oldest public museum

Founded in 1807, The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow is Scotland’s oldest public museum and was the first to have its entire collection recognised as being of national significance for Scotland. The Hunterian belongs to an elite group of university museums that have collected across a wide spectrum of disciplines for research and teaching. Amongst The Hunterian’s treasures today are the scientific apparatus used by James Watt and Lord Kelvin; monumental sculpture and antiquities from the Antonine Wall; major earth, life and medical sciences holdings; Scotland’s most important print and numismatic collections; rare ‘first contact’ artefacts from the Pacific Ocean; and extensive collections of European and Scottish art, including the personal estates of the artist James McNeill Whistler and architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. David Gaimster, the Hunterian’s Director, has made an extraordinary selection of objects, each of which tell a compelling narrative in respect of their origin and what they reveal about the changing intellectual climate of collecting and research over 200 years.

Professor David Gaimster has been Director of The Hunterian, the University of Glasgow museum and gallery service, since 2010. Before moving to Glasgow he was General Secretary, Society of Antiquaries of London; Senior Policy Advisor for Cultural Property, Department for Culture, Media & Sport, London; and Assistant Keeper in the Department for Medieval & Later Antiquities, British Museum, London. He has published extensively on late medieval to early modern European archaeology and material culture.