One Guinea

One Guinea for the Collection Attendant

We were invited by artist Elizabeth Price to enact Clause Six of the Chalmers Bequest, contained within the Will of Alexander Chalmers.

Elizabeth Price has been working since December 2000 to re-enact each of the clauses contained within the Bequest.

At 5.30 pm on Thursday 12th December 2002 the collection attendant in exchange for the guinea, took the opportunity to share his knowledge of the collection with visitors.

And in keeping with the spirit of the collection –it consists of paintings, sculptures, objects of virtue, souvenirs, mantle-piece decoration and jumble sale trophies - mixed the anecdotal with the factual, the intimate with the official and the contemporary with the historical.

Alexander Henry Chalmers, died in April 1927 aged 78. Buried next to his wife in Abney Park Cemetery, he worked for forty years as a ledger clerk in the Provident Clerks Company in the City of London. On his death his will left money for his family, but not his brother, various hospitals, the bellringer at the Old Church in Stoke Newington, for a church organ, the Lifeboat fund and other charitable trusts, but most importantly of all to care for and continue his collection.

Chalmers wanted to found the nucleus of a public museum in Stoke Newington, as other great men –like Hans Sloane at the British Museum- had done before him; to turn his personal taste into public culture. He bequeathed his life-long collection and money for its continuance to the local authority.

Chalmers collected ‘to mimic the joy afforded him by our great National Treasury of Art’ but his collection was humble, feeble even; limited by lack of funds and even more so by lack of education.

What remains is the ghost of ambition, and evidence of a terrible longing. A longing shared with other collections and collectors, to be remembered after death and live on as a public good.

At the end of the project, the remnants of the Chalmers Bequest returned to the sleep of permanent storage.