British Museum

===Cabinet of curiosities (1753–1778)===
[[File:Rosetta Stone International Congress of Orientalists ILN 1874.jpg|thumb|The [[Rosetta Stone]] on display in the British Museum in 1874]]
The body of trustees decided on a converted 17th-century mansion, [[Montagu House, Bloomsbury|Montagu House]], as a location for the museum, which it bought from the [[Ralph Montagu, 1st Duke of Montagu|Montagu family]] for £20,000. The trustees rejected Buckingham House, which was later converted into the present day [[Buckingham Palace]], on the grounds of cost and the unsuitability of its location.<ref>{{cite book|last=Wilson|first=David, M.|year=2002|title=The British Museum: A History|location=London|publisher=The British Museum Press|pages=25}}</ref><ref group="lower-alpha">This was perhaps rather unfortunate as the title to the house was complicated by the fact that part of the building had been erected on leasehold property (the Crown lease of which ran out in 1771); perhaps that is why [[George III]] paid such a modest price (nominally £28,000) for what was to become Buckingham Palace. See [[Howard Colvin]] ''et al.'' (1976), 134.</ref>

With the acquisition of Montagu House, the first exhibition galleries and [[Library|reading room]] for scholars opened on 15 January 1759.<ref>{{cite magazine|title=The British Museum opened on January 15th, 1759|url=http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/british-museum-opened|date=January 2009|volume=59|issue=1|magazine=[[History Today]]|last=Cavendish|first=Richard|access-date=15 January 2016|archive-date=17 January 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160117213759/http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/british-museum-opened|url-status=live}}</ref> At this time, the largest parts of collection were the library, which took up the majority of the rooms on the ground floor of Montagu House, and the natural history objects, which took up an entire wing on the second state storey of the building. In 1763, the trustees of the British Museum, under the influence of [[Peter Collinson (botanist)|Peter Collinson]] and [[William Watson (scientist)|William Watson]], employed the former student of [[Carl Linnaeus]], [[Daniel Solander]], to reclassify the natural history collection according to the [[Linnaean taxonomy|Linnaean system]], thereby making the museum a public centre of learning accessible to the full range of European natural historians.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Rose|first1=ED|title=Specimens, slips and systems: Daniel Solander and the classification of nature at the world's first public museum, 1753–1768.|journal=British Journal for the History of Science|volume=51|issue=2|date=15 April 2018|pages=205–237|doi=10.1017/S0007087418000249|pmid=29655387|url=https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/1810/275144/1/Edwin%20D.%20Rose%2c%20Specimens%2c%20Slips%20and%20Systems.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/1810/275144/1/Edwin%20D.%20Rose%2c%20Specimens%2c%20Slips%20and%20Systems.pdf |archive-date=9 October 2022 |url-status=live}}</ref> In 1823, King George IV gave the [[King's Library]] assembled by George III,<ref>{{cite web|title=Collection Guides – King's Library|url=https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/the-kings-library|access-date=1 June 2020|archive-date=7 August 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190807055224/https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/the-kings-library|url-status=live}}</ref> and Parliament gave the right to a copy of every book published in the country, thereby ensuring that the museum's library would expand indefinitely. During the few years after its foundation the British Museum received several further gifts, including the [[Thomason Collection of Civil War Tracts]] and [[David Garrick]]'s library of 1,000 printed plays. The predominance of natural history, books and manuscripts began to lessen when in 1772 the museum acquired for £8,410 its first significant antiquities in [[William Hamilton (diplomat)|Sir William Hamilton]]'s "first" collection of [[Pottery of ancient Greece|Greek vases]].<ref name="Hoock2010">{{cite book|last1=Hoock|first1=Holger|title=Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850|date=2010|publisher=Profile Books|isbn=9781861978592|page=207|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tuW554NdWk8C&q=%22william+hamilton%22%22british+museum%22+greek+vases&pg=PA207|access-date=21 July 2016|archive-date=15 March 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230315094930/https://books.google.com/books?id=tuW554NdWk8C&q=%22william+hamilton%22%22british+museum%22+greek+vases&pg=PA207|url-status=live}}</ref>