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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Parthicus, post: 2891771, member: 81887&quot;]At the Walters Art Museum here in Baltimore, there is a permanent exhibit called the Chamber of Wonders that recreates the sort of collection that a cultured 17th century European gentleman would be expected to display.&nbsp; It is a glorious hodgepodge of ancient-to-(17th century) modern art and artifacts, animal trophies, minerals, fossils, and other natural and artificial objects.&nbsp; Naturally, part of the collection is a group of ancient coins.&nbsp; Here are some old and not-very-good photos, the first shows the main room and the other two show the coins.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]695230[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]695231[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]695232[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Re: Donating items to a museum, I would also be frustrated if my donation were refused, but I can also understand why curators don&#039;t want their hands tied by terms in a donation agreement that limit their abilities to do what is best for the museum.&nbsp; Any museum collection requires staff and facilities to properly store, preserve, and catalogue it, and to make it available for study by experts; coins have additional security requirements due to their high resale value to theft susceptibility ratio.&nbsp; As someone who collects both coins and fossils, and loves the museums that display such things, I am also frustrated with the problems that museums face nowadays, but restricting what they can do with our donated items is not going to help them.</p><p><br /></p><p>A good example is the story of the Barnes Foundation.&nbsp; It was founded by Albert Barnes, a wealthy businessman and avid art collector in Philadelphia who died in 1951, leaving a collection heavy in Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Modernist art including Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and many others.&nbsp; Under the terms set for the Foundation in Barnes&#039; will, the collection had to remain intact, displayed only in the exact positions Barnes had decreed, in the original building in an inconvenient Philadelphia suburb, and could not ever be loaned or traded.&nbsp; By the 1990s, the Foundation was in financial disarray, many in the art world were complaining that few people were being allowed to see the collection, and portions of the will were challenged.&nbsp; A few key paintings were loaned out for traveling exhibits, which generated useful funds and publicity, and eventually the Foundation agreed to move the collection to a new building in Philadelphia, near the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rodin Museum, where it has been a major success.&nbsp; The art is still displayed in Mr. Barnes&#039; arrangements, which show common themes across artworks from different artists or time periods, but now in a location that is easy to access.&nbsp; The collection has remained intact, and is now seen and appreciated by far more people, because the curators were finally given permission to move to a new location despite the original donor&#039;s wishes.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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