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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Ceilings of the Natural History Museum, London/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 30 June 2019 [1].

Ceilings of the Natural History Museum, London

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Nominator(s):  ‑ Iridescent 17:39, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This is more interesting than it sounds, and takes in everything from the invention of chocolate milk, to the Boston Tea Party, to the religious significance of olives in the Church of England. The two botanical ceilings of London's Natural History Museum are one of the unheralded treasures of 19th-century art. They're also very hard to describe, let alone illustrate; the nature of their design means that there's no point from which the entire extent of the main ceiling is visible at once, their use of reflective materials mean they (intentionally) appear different from different angles and in different lighting, and they're too high off the ground and too fragile to photograph in detail without the use of specialist climbing robots. (Not to mention that from most vantage points, they're obscured by the skeleton of a dead blue whale.) To add to this, the records of its design and construction are lost, so we're not entirely sure how they were created and what everything depicted is actually supposed to represent. The Natural History Museum spent most of the 20th century loathed by architectural historians, so there hasn't been as much written about the ceilings as you might expect, but over the last 20 years or so they've started to get the attention they deserve. As far as I am aware, this article summarises everything of significance that's been written about them.

To pre-empt a few queries; no, I can't find a source for the exact dimensions of them, even in The Gilded Canopy which goes into obsessive levels of detail. (Because they're not flat, ceilings are hard to measure; Sistine Chapel ceiling also omits the dimensions.) On a first read, the initial sections appear to be full of non sequiturs, but those are background either as to why individual plants were chosen to be illustrated, or why Owen and Waterhouse came to build such an improbably large and fancy structure in the first place. For the larger of the two halls, I use "Central Hall" throughout, as that's the name it was know by for almost all its existence; it's officially "Hintze Hall" following a large donation from Michael Hintze, but aside from those occasions on which the NHM are contractually obliged to do so I doubt anyone has ever actually called it that. A number of the books cited are published by the NHM, but I wouldn't consider the usual WP:SPS issues to come into play; when it comes to the history of English botanical illustration the NHM and Kew are the only significant publishers, and it's not as if they have anything to gain from self-promotion in this case (nobody visits a natural history museum to look at the design of the ceiling). ‑ Iridescent 17:39, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Drive-by comment Support from Victoria

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Iridescent, you never fail to astound. This is amazing and I'm tempted to simply stamp it with an enthusiastic support but suppose I should do my due diligence, read from top to bottom, and nitpick to death, though I'm not sure I have the energy. Anyway, will put it on my watchlist and try to get back with some sort of criticism. If not, you and the coords are free to ignore this comment. Victoria (tk) 20:07, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
No, nitpick it all you can; this was written in dribs and drabs over a period of more than a year, and it's entirely possible that either my train of thought shifted midway, or something that seemed obvious to me won't seem obvious to anyone else. ‑ Iridescent 17:47, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Iri Huge apologies for not getting back here earlier. Like all of us, I got distracted and am beyond demoralized but don't want to leave you hanging. I've read through twice, made some notes during the first read through and see that everything I noted has now been addressed. The only thing I might mention, but I'm honestly lukewarm and it's a preference only, is that the tables could be moved to a list article and expanded but that's enormous amount of work. Still, it would be beautiful. Also wanted to mention how wonderful the Google Cultural Institute site is. Wonderful work here. I've moved to support. Victoria (tk) 21:31, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I discussed splitting off the tables with The Rambling Man, in his capacity as The List Guy. We were both in agreement that given how niche this topic is, it would be pointless having two separate articles on it since anyone interested in one would also read the other; plus, so many entries on the list are references to the history and vice versa, one would end up duplicating most of the "historical background" material onto the list article anyway. (Most of the apparent non sequiturs in the background, such as Sloane's invention of chocolate milk, only make sense when the link to items depicted on the ceilings is made clear.) ‑ Iridescent 21:38, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that occurred to me. At first I thought of Bamses List of National Treasures of Japan (paintings) and his other National Treasures lists, but each of those does include "historical background". So it's one or the other. In the end I think you made the right choice, but wanted to mention it. Victoria (tk) 21:47, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Image and source review

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Well, that's a cornucopia of images; and there I thought one could not exceed the galleries in Parinacota (volcano).

It sees like all images are in good places. ALT text seems fine as well. WRT the references I didn't run any spotcheck, but they seem to be adequately formatted and reliable to me. I take the bibliography are the top-notch sources on the matter? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:31, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The photographs of the ceiling and building won't be either PD-old or fall under FoP; they're copyright to whoever took them, and duly licenced as such. (Bridgeman Corel is a US case and doesn't apply in the UK.) FoP doesn't come into play here; that's the clause under which it's permitted to publish a photograph of a work that's still in copyright provided it's on permanent public display, but all the works here are long-since in the public domain. Regarding File:Hans Sloane by Stephen Slaughter, 1736, National Portrait Gallery, London.JPG, while it's clearly not "own work" as claimed by the uploader I'm not going to lose sleep over the exact tag Commons uses, as Stephen Slaughter died in 1765 so is not about to turn up complaining we're violating his copyrights. (That image is primarily there to break up a large block of text, and anything else from commons:Category:Hans Sloane can substitute for it if it's an issue.) File:Richard-owen2.jpg is a reproduction of an 1878 (i.e., definitely public domain) portrait in the National Portrait Gallery; in the wake of previous unpleasantness I'm extremely reluctant to upload anything directly from the NPG website. (There are lots of portraits of Owen, but I wanted to use this one as it shows him at the time the ceiling was painted; most portraits of him date from his period of greatest fame as the leading opponent to Darwin around the time of the 1860 Oxford evolution debate, and show a much younger man.) ‑ Iridescent 17:46, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, the question about the ceiling tile copyright was because such a photo can have two copyrights, that of the tile painter and that of the photographer; the current file descriptions say that the photographer have licensed the file in a Wikipedia-acceptable way but there is nothing about any (now lapsed) copyrights on the tile. The other issues are also more technicalities about how the license(s) are stated, actually. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:25, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm reluctant to get into attributing the panels in the individual image descriptions, as we really don't know much about who designed them. We know Charles Lea did the physical painting and we're fairly confident Waterhouse was primarily responsible for choosing the designs, but the records are lost; whether the designs were created by Waterhouse or by one or more of the British Museum's botanists, whether Owen was involved in their creation and selection or purely Waterhouse, whether they were original designs or ripped off from existing botanical illustrations, and what technique Lea actually used (e.g. whether he climbed the scaffolding and painted directly, or whether he painted at ground level and then carried them up) are all matters of speculation. In a Wikipedia article we can say Records do not survive of how the plants to be represented were chosen and who created the initial designs. Knapp & Press (2005) believe that it was almost certainly Waterhouse himself, likely working from specimens in the museum's botanical collections, while William T. Stearn, writing in 1980, believes that the illustrations were chosen by botanist William Carruthers, who at the time was the museum's Keeper of Botany. To create the painted panels from the initial cartoons, Waterhouse commissioned Manchester artist Charles James Lea of Best & Lea, with whom he had already worked on Pilmore Hall in Hurworth-on-Tees. Waterhouse provided Lea with a selection of botanical drawings, and requested that Lea "select and prepare drawings of fruits and flowers most suitable and gild same in the upper panels of the roof"; it is not recorded who drew the cartoons for the paintings, or how the species were chosen. How the panels were painted is not recorded, but it is likely Lea painted directly onto the ceiling from the scaffolding., but that's not something that fits easily into the {{Technique}} and {{Creator}} templates on Commons. ‑ Iridescent 20:05, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
We can probably safely assume that the designs are all public domain due to age, yeah? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:03, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
In Commons-ese, the ceilings would fall under PD-old-assumed as we can't specify the creators with certainty; the architectural elements such as the ceiling arches, girders and sculptures would be PD-old-70 as those we can definitely attribute to Waterhouse and he's definitely dead. The whale could theoretically be subject to copyright if the NHM tried to claim (a) that their re-hanging of the skeleton in 2016 constituted a new "work of artistic craftsmanship" and (b) that because they may at some point decide to take it down again, it's not "permanently situated in premises open to the public", but if they seriously tried to claim that a 130-year-old dead animal constitutes intellectual property they'd be laughed out of court. ‑ Iridescent 22:18, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
OK, commons:Template:PD-old-assumed it is for the ceilings. Regarding the skeleton, I recall a Commons discussion commons:Commons:Village_pump/Copyright/Archive/2016/04#Dinosaur skeletons copyrighted? about whether reconstructed skeletons might be copyrighted; but that was for reconstructions, a copyright claim on a natural skeleton with no modification would probably be questionable even under sweat of the brow. Especially if the modifications were done 130 years ago. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:33, 4 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nikkimaria, do you have any thoughts on these? (The images aren't problematic—nobody's disputing that the paintings are out of copyright and all the photographers who took the derivative works have correctly CC BY-SA licensed them—but it's just a matter of whether and how they need to be re-tagged on Commons.) ‑ Iridescent 20:12, 4 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think the whale would have copyright protection. I'd definitely throw some kind of PD due to expiration template on Hans_Sloane_by_Stephen_Slaughter,_1736,_National_Portrait_Gallery,_London.JPG, a US PD tag on the 2D images that don't have one, and a PD-old-assumed tag on the tile images that don't yet have one. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:20, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm certain the whale won't have copyright protection; the issue with dinosaurs was that since we don't know for sure how they looked, original thought was going into arranging their skeletons for display, but no originality goes into displaying a skeleton in its normal configuration. Unless anyone suggests otherwise in the next couple of days, I'll paste a piece of explanatory text onto the tile images, as I don't think Commons has templates for this situation. I assume we're all in agreement that none of the images are actually problematic. ‑ Iridescent 09:14, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Aye, I don't think any of the images is a problem, but I think that there might actually be a template for this: commons:Template:Licensed-PD where one can put in both a license for the photos and one to describe the tile copyright. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:24, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Good find, I'll use that. ‑ Iridescent 09:27, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
✓ Done. I think that's all of them; the only ones on which I haven't fixed the licensing are a couple uploaded by John Cummings when he was Wikipedian in Residence at the NHM, as the museum are obviously not going to contest those and there may be contractural reasons the specific tags used were chosen. ‑ Iridescent 09:56, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Support. This is a tremendous article. Only two minor points on the prose, neither of which affects my support.

  • in the third para of the Background section something has gone awry with the possessive apostrophe in "the museums's holdings".
  • in the Deterioration, restoration and conservation section: "erecting the scaffolding was additionaly difficult to avoid damaging the fragile mosaic..." – there is a typo, but on top of that I don’t think the sentence reads well. I always hesitate to suggest adding extra words, but I think perhaps this would read better as "erecting the scaffolding was additionally difficult because of the need to avoid damaging the fragile mosaic" or some such.

That's all from me. The article meets the FA criteria in my view. It is a splendid read, well and widely referenced, gorgeously illustrated and seems to my inexpert eye to be comprehensive. I enjoyed this and will be looking at the building anew next time I'm there. – Tim riley talk 09:29, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks, both fixed. If you're in the area, I do recommend taking the time to have a look at the ceilings—there's generally a long queue of school parties at the main entrance, but if one goes in the side entrance in Exhibition Road (the former Geological Museum) and walks straight ahead rather than following the escalator onto which they try to direct you, after passing a slightly disturbing exhibit of preserved avian body parts you'll emerge into Mary Anning's fossil collection which in turn leads directly into the Central Hall. The building itself is architecturally interesting anyway, as the combination of piecemeal development over 14 decades and its highly visible site makes it something of a museum of prevailing architectural fashions, but on that more later if and when I get around to it. ‑ Iridescent 15:51, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

SC

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Lead
  • "Designed by the museum's architect Alfred Waterhouse and painted by the artist Charles James Lea, they consist of 162 panels in the Central Hall, 108 of which depict plants considered significant to the history of the museum, to the British Empire or the museum's visitors and the remainder of which are highly stylised decorative botanical paintings, and of 36 panels in the North Hall, 18 of which depict a variety of plants growing in the British Isles." That's a mammoth sentence that carries a lot of information; it could be broken in two for ease of reading.
    (replying inline even though I know it annoys the delegates) Split, although I'm not entirely happy with the result as it means the word "ceiling" appearing five times in one paragraph
    (That's fine: I prefer it like this). You could make the last sentence "Painted directly onto plaster, they also make use of gilding for visual effect." It trims one away and still holds together?
    I'm reluctant, as that way it's not clear that Lea climbed up the scaffolding and painted directly onto the roof, rather than just painting the individual panels on the ground and climbing up there to attach them. ‑ Iridescent 19:06, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • "The Natural History collections": As it's not a proper noun, shouldn't it be lower case (as you do in the last words of the same sentence and in a lower down section)?
    Technically it should be in uppercase as a proper name (officially the British Museum (Natural History) but nobody ever included the prefix), but I agree it's too confusing to use uppercase for the name and lowercase for the collections. ‑ Iridescent 16:14, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Background
Plans for a Natural History building
  • The section title: "a Natural History building". Again, are we sure of the capitalisation on this? The first sentence talks of "the natural history department"
    In this context, the uppercase needs to stay even though it's confusing. The BM had four natural history departments, which together were moved to the Natural History building. (Although it's always informally been called "the Natural History Museum", officially it was just the Natural History building of the British Museum until it gained independence in 1992.) ‑ Iridescent 16:14, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    That's fine, as long as you're consistent (I haven't checked if you are or not) - SchroCat (talk) 18:42, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • "(Only nine of the British Museum's 50 trustees...)": I'm never a fan of full sentences in brackets: perhaps as a footnote instead? And technically it should be nine and fifty, or 9 and 50.
    "Fifty" written in full. I don't particularly like sentences in parentheses, but I think this is a reasonable exception; otherwise, a reasonable reader will assume "the trustees of the museum approved Owen's proposal" means there was broad support for the building plan, not that only 18% of the trustees supported the plan but it passed on a technicality. I'm reluctant to relegate it to the already crowded footnotes where most readers won't see it.
  • Seventy whales: I don't think this needs to be bracketed at all
    This was initially a footnote, but I thought it gave a good general idea of the scale of the building without going into dry dimensions so moved it up into the text. To me, without the brackets it seems a little disjointed—the other possibility, attaching it to the previous sentence, would make that sentence too long. ‑ Iridescent 16:14, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Alfred Waterhouse image – possibly move to the left, so he's looking "into" the article?
    That would mean having to alternate images left/right—you can't just have one image on the left and all the others on the right—and alternating images on a page with so much complex markup and indenting would make it unreadable. I've never really understood that "portraits should face the text" thing, which I've never seen or heard anywhere other Wikipedia and has always struck me as a WP:SNODGRASS rule. ‑ Iridescent 16:14, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Done to the start of the "Main ceiling" section. This is very readable and interesting stuff. – SchroCat (talk) 07:47, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Continuing...

North Hall
  • We have a large, luscious image of the central hall's ceiling centred in the age, but the North Hall has an equally luscious image in a smaller and side-lined position. Could this get the same treatment as the central hall image – comme ça?
    It could, but the North Hall section isn't really all that interesting. The golden ceiling of the Central Hall is a vast artwork representing the final flowering (sic) of creationism as a mainstream science, when botanical illustration was still considered a branch of theology and representing the Works of God deserved just as much respect as representing the Family of God; the North Hall ceiling is a fairly dull addendum that wouldn't look out of place in a provincial Wetherspoons. Plus (and more pertinently) we only have one photo that shows the whole of the North ceiling, and that's a poor-quality snapshot I took on my phone which probably wouldn't stand up to magnification. (Because it's now the canteen, the North Hall isn't easy to photograph; for the Central Hall you can lean off the balconies and get a clear line of sight, but photographing the North Hall means lying on the floor like a drunk with your camera pointed upwards, surrounded by people eating their lunch.) ‑ Iridescent 19:40, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm tempted to strike my support and force you pop down there and do just that! Next time I'm in the area I'll see if I can get another image for you. - SchroCat (talk) 20:04, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That's it from me. A lovely article - I wish we had space or allowance for more and larger images, given the beauty of the things. Nothing to stop me going to Support on this now. Cheer - SchroCat (talk) 19:16, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks… as per my reply to Tim above, I do recommend popping in if you're ever passing by; the museum itself isn't really up to much compared to its neighbours, but the building is an artwork in its own right. ‑ Iridescent 19:42, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Cassianto

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Claiming my place. Reading through now. CassiantoTalk 18:09, 20 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • I will say from the off, ref 175: The date is in the American format, while all the others are BrEng. Consistency is key and while they should all be formatted the same way, BrEng has the edge, it being a British building. CassiantoTalk 18:16, 20 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    Good catch; for some of the entries on the individual plants I used the references from the existing articles on the plants—there didn't seem a great deal of point tracking down new references for such trivial things as "hazelnuts come from hazel trees". ‑ Iridescent 18:21, 20 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Background

*"Irish physician Hans Sloane..." -- BrEng does favour the definite article before names, and so do I, but it may fall towards personal choice.

  • You've struck this but I'll reply anyway in case anyone else raises it—in this case I don't think the article is appropriate, as "The Irish physician" makes it sound like he was the only doctor in Ireland. ‑ Iridescent 19:40, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • "With the British Museum now established numerous other collectors began to donate and bequeath items to the museum's collections, which were further swelled by large quantities of exhibits brought to England in 1771 by the first voyage of James Cook, by a large collection of Egyptian antiquities (including the Rosetta Stone) ceded by the French in the Capitulation of Alexandria, by the 1816 purchase of the Elgin Marbles by the British government who in turn passed them to the museum, and by the 1820 bequest of the vast botanical collections of Joseph Banks." -- That is a hell of a sentence and I found myself tailing off and having to re-read it a few times. There's also, in my opinion, a heavy use of "by the". Too many for comfortable reading.
    I did it that way intentionally to try to give the reader an impression of the constant influx of stuff pouring in. It's splittable if you think it's problematic. Basically, it boils down to "they had a lot of random stuff dumped on them in quick succession which was too important to give away or hide in storerooms, but which they didn't have space to display". ‑ Iridescent 19:53, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Other collectors continued to sell, donate or bequeath their collections to the museum, and by this time..." -- By which time? We mention several year ranges above and then in the next sentence, we skip back to 1809.
    Clarified; it was 1807 that they decided there wasn't enough space, but they didn't do anything about acquiring more space leading to the 1808–09 bonfires. ‑ Iridescent 19:40, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Plans for a Natural History building

  • "...in 1856 the natural history department was split into separate departments of botany, zoology, mineralogy and geology departments" -- thrice repetition of "department(s)".
    Fixed, good catch ‑ Iridescent 19:53, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • "...was unhappy with the museum containing botanical specimens at all" -- redundant use of "at all".
    I'm not sure about this. It's not unusual for a natural history museum to contain some plants even if it focuses on animals, in the same way that back before the Geological Museum and the Natural History Museum merged the NHM still had some mineral specimens on display. Owen initially wanted a specific Museum of Stuffed Animals with no botanical specimens whatsoever, which would have been a fairly unusual arrangement. ‑ Iridescent 19:53, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Waterhouse's buildings

  • "...although expensive to build, this was resistant to the acid rain" -- this? "It" sounds better if your meaning the building. Unless you're talking about the terracotta, in which case "this" could be used.
    It's the terracotta facing that's being referred to here; the theory was that although terracotta picks up dirt more easily than brick it doesn't erode, so no matter how bad London's pollution got the building could just be hosed down and the decorative carvings would appear good-as-new. He was ultimately proved right; the terracotta animals are still pristine. ‑ Iridescent 19:53, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Central Hall

  • Sorry, I may have missed it, but is there a reason why the Central Hall is being spoken of in the past tense?
    I've reworded the opening of this paragraph to start Central Hall was to be…, to hopefully make it clearer. At this point it hadn't yet been built; we're talking about Waterhouse's original plans which Ayrton was trying to veto. ‑ Iridescent 20:19, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Main ceiling

  • "...or to the museum itself.[73] Each block of three columns depicts a different species, but all have a broadly similar design.[73] The central column in the lowest row depicts the trunk or stalk of the plant in question, while the panels on either side and the three panels of the row above depict the branches of the plant spreading from the lower central panel.[73]" -- Is there a need to keep citing the same reference after every sentence? This continues throughout the article, but in other areas, such as the smaller sections, you use just one.
    I'm inclined to keep the separate references here, as this section (about the composition of the main panels) is the aspect on which it's most likely someone will publish another book; plus, "all have a broadly similar design" is the kind of thing that sounds like it could be my own opinion so I ideally want to make is clear this is a referenced fact. ‑ Iridescent 20:25, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

North Hall

  • "The display was not successful..." -- Orwell would argue that it is better to use one word rather than two, so "unsuccessful" would perhaps be better.
    No problem, done ‑ Iridescent 20:25, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Stopping for now. I'm much enjoying this. CassiantoTalk 20:14, 21 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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