Waddesdon Bequest Gallery

Stanton Williams has designed a new permanent gallery within the British Museum, to re-display the Waddesdon Bequest, a collection of Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces left to the Museum by the Rothschild family in 1898. The gallery allows the collection to be better understood with stronger links to the original home of the collection, the Smoking Room of Waddesdon Manor. The design evokes the qualities of historic European Schatzkammers (treasure chambers), reinterprets the collection for the twenty-first century and revitalises one of the most historically important spaces in the Museum.