Museum Quiz — Answers

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1.  b) The Louvres has held the top spot of most visited museums for a number of years with a peak of 9.3 million visitors in 2015.

2. Sir Hans Sloane gave the avocado its name in his 1696 catalogue of Jamaican plants.

3. False. The Night Watch does not in fact depict a night scene, its just the layers and layers of varnish applied to the work over the years have caused it to appear as if the scene is set at night. The painting completed in 1642 is actually entitled ‘Officers and Other Civic Guardsmen of District II Amsterdam’ but became popularly known as The Night Watch from the 18th century.

4. The World’s smallest museum is the Warley Museum in West Yorkshire whose collection is housed inside an old red telephone box.

5. The Hermitage has maintained a population of cats since 1745 when they were brought in to control the mice. Today the museums is home to approximately 75 felines.

6. 8 elephants appear in the diorama, one of which was shot and killed by Theodore Roosevelt.

7. No whole dodo skeleton exists but the mummified head and foot of a dodo is kept at Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History. Due to the survival of soft tissue on the specimen scientists have been able to extract DNA, making it an extremely valuable specimen.

8. c) As police officers. The thieves arrived before the museum opened for the day pretending that they were responding to a disturbance. Once inside they tied up the museum guards and made off with 13 paintings by artists such as Degas, Vermeer and Manet. To date the works have yet to be recovered.

9. a) 3 weeks

10. 1. Princess Ennigaldi’s Museum (Ur, Iraq) – established c. 530 BCE

2. Capitoline Museums (Rome, Italy) – established 1471.

3. Ashmoleon Museum (Oxford) – established 1683

4. Musee des Beaux-arts et D’archaeologie (Besançon, France) – established 1694

11. Sir John Heydon’s hand was severed in a duel in 1620 and today resides in an ornate box at Norwich Castle Museum.

12. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is the setting for The Goldfinch, despite the fact that the painting The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius is actually housed by the Mauritshuis in The Hague.

13. The fatberg was 250 metres long and weighed in at 130 tonnes. It was largely comprised of grease, congealed oil and wet wipes.

14. a) It has been calculated that it would take 100 days to view every item in the museum’s collection.

15. c) Landscape with Snow by Van Gogh. The Guggenheim refused Trump’s request and instead offered America by Maurizio Cattelan – a fully-functioning gold toilet

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