Discoveries: Art, Science & Exploration from the University of Cambridge Museums, Two Temple Place, London
Can you distil the intellectual life of centuries into an exhibition? If so, Cambridge’s eight major museums are uniquely placed to do so. Each is distinctive, from the Museum of Zoology, home of a Tinamou egg acquired in Uruguay by Charles Darwin (who cracked it by compressing it into too small a box on the Beagle’s return voyage), and the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, whose founder Reverend Sedgwick bought a rare Jurassic ichthyosaur fossil for £50 in 1835, to high-minded Kettle’s Yard, where collector Jim Ede amassed rigorous modernist abstract sculpture by Gaudier-Brzeska and Henry Moore in a modest domestic interior.
