Curzon’s cases: making a museum at Kedleston Hall

In 1916 Lord Curzon inherited his ancestral home, Kedleston Hall, and set about planning its renovation. Part of this work was the creation of a new museum in which to display his collection of ‘Eastern’ objects, amassed through his viceregal career and his extensive travels as a young man. The commission of display cases was central to this project. Designed to Curzon’s specifications, drawn from V&A models, cases imported museum modes of display and encounter into Kedleston. This article explores how cases defined sensory encounters with the objects within them and fixed how they would be read. The stabilisation of these objects within cases would in turn stabilise Curzon's legacy by building it into the architecture of Kedleston. The cases structure the objects within them, holding them out of time and space, fixing them into visual symbols and defining how visitors would encounter them.