Statue of Charles Darwin
Joseph Edgar Boehm (1834 to 1890) · 1885
At the top of the first flight of the great staircase, Charles Darwin sits in a marble armchair and gazes down the length of Hintze Hall. He is shown as an old man, bearded and thoughtful, his hands resting on his knees, the pose of someone who has finished a long argument and is content to let others weigh it. From here he seems to preside over the whole museum, from the whale above to the crowds below, which is fitting, since everything displayed here is organised around the ideas he set out in On the Origin of Species.
The sculptor Joseph Edgar Boehm was a favourite of Queen Victoria and produced a figure that is dignified rather than dramatic. Look at the treatment of the coat and the loosely folded hands, carved with a softness that makes the stone seem almost like cloth. Boehm worked from photographs and from the memories of Darwin's family, and the face has the heavy brow and gentle, tired eyes familiar from the last portraits taken at Down House.
The statue was unveiled in 1885, three years after Darwin's death, in a ceremony attended by the Prince of Wales and by Thomas Huxley, Darwin's fiercest public defender. It was placed on this landing as a deliberate statement, because the museum's first director, Richard Owen, had opposed Darwin's theory for decades. In 1927 the statue was moved aside to make room for a figure of Owen himself, and Darwin spent years in a side gallery. He was restored to his original place in 2008 for the bicentenary of his birth, and Owen now stands elsewhere in the hall.
Did You Know? For most of the twentieth century Darwin sat in the museum's cafe area, while Richard Owen, who never accepted evolution, occupied this spot.
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