The house of nature. (Re)locating scientific collections in eighteenth-century Paris

This essay returns to a well-known interior of the eighteenth century; the hÔtel particulier of Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson (1702-1744) in rue Saint Dominique, Paris. Renovated in 1726 to accommodate Bonnier’s vast collection of curiosities, including a library, optics and architecture cabinets, shells and fossils cupboards, a chemistry laboratory, and a room for fancy turning, this interior has been considered the epitome of eighteenth-century social ambitions and of rococo luxury. The sculpted cupboards, scientific instruments, paintings and a set of drawings depicting these spaces have survived scattered in five different public collections (Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, Institut National d’ Histoire de l’Art) and in private collections (former Alfred Beit Foundation, sold at Christie’s in 2015). The contemporary experience of the cabinet is thus dependent on disciplinary boundaries that have created the physical separation between technology, fine and decorative arts, and books. What previous reconstructions of these interiors did not address, however, is the relation of the interior to the exterior – that is, of the collection to the outside world. Through the examination of an over door painting, a moving picture and the garden adjacent to Bonnier’s hÔtel, this chapter focuses on the ways the collection alludes to outdoor spaces, thus evoking the epistemological tension between urban experience of science and its practice in the field. Ultimately, the chapter questions the cabinet as interior and claims its necessary relation to the natural environment, a relation too often neglected in the context of modern museums.