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Reports of the shortage first came last year from the British Museum, one of the world’s largest repositories of a variety of artifacts. When the PA news agency requested data on museums and art galleries over the past 20 years, even greater losses were revealed.
Museums argue that not everything is stolen or lost – errors in documents are also possible, they do happen and objects are found later.
Last summer, the British Museum admitted that more than 2,000 artifacts from its collection had been stolen, lost or damaged. 45 works of art were not found in the National Portrait Gallery. This is the first museum in the world to exclusively exhibit depictions of famous people in a variety of art techniques, from sculptures and paintings to photographs.
For example, between 2007 and 2022, the 1869 drawing of Queen Victoria and the negative of a photo from the 1947 wedding of Elizabeth II, who died last year, were not found.
Gallery officials say they have not yet completed a full inventory after three years of renovations, and the missing items represent only 0.02% of the entire collection of 12,700 portraits and 164,000 other images. What is largely missing are photo negatives, most of which have been digitized and are publicly available in the gallery’s database.
180 artefacts, including various drawings, underwear, socks, fake mustaches and a mousetrap, are missing from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Around 245 exhibits, including compasses, maps, an air navigation computer and a cannonball, have disappeared from the Royal Greenwich Museums, which include the famous Observatory, the National Maritime Museum, the Cutty Sark and the Queen’s House.
Greenwich explains that the confusion could have been caused by overwriting information from one database to another. Since 2008, 560 items thought to be missing have been found during repeated checks.
The Natural History Museum in London has admitted that the jaw fragment of a Diphydontosaurus is missing and was most likely stolen in 2019. In 2020, a crocodile tooth disappeared. Feathers, muscles and liver of petrels were damaged by improper refrigeration, several samples containing octopus and bird tissue.
The museum representative says that these are mostly small things and that in the last 20 years there have only been 23 cases in which something from the 80 million-object collection went missing.
The Science Museum Group includes the Science Museum in London, the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, the National Railway Museum in York, the Locomotive Museum in Shildon and the National Science and Recording Museum in Bradford.
In 2014, two models of steam locomotives – King George V and British Railways Standard 4MT – were stolen and reported to police. Also missing are the resuscitation device and the portrait of Joseph Marie Jacquard, the 19th century inventor of the first programmable loom. Workers have begun barcoding all artifacts to make them easier to track.
Up to 550 objects have disappeared from the Imperial War Museum (four branches in London and Manchester, mainly dedicated to the two world wars and beyond), including personal documents of British army officers and a canceled calendar with a photo of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and Banknotes. The representative of the museum assures us that these are “cheap mass-produced objects”.
Art museums and the Tate Gallery report no losses.
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