London's Victoria and Albert Museum is famous for couture gowns and medieval tapestries, but tucked into its stores is a collection with a darker streak: more than a century and a half of memento mori — art made to remind us that death comes for everyone.
The museum, now 174 years old, has quietly gathered skulls, skeletons and mourning jewellery across its history. Curator Ruth Hibbard, who works across art, architecture, photography and design, has been showing off some of the standouts, and they're more beautiful than grim.
The pièce de résistance is a sixteenth-century gold enamel ring set with rubies and topped with a skull and crossbones. It predates the pirate era, so forget swashbucklers — this belonged to someone in the Elizabethan upper classes with what you might call proto-goth taste. Alongside it sits a ring with a complete miniature skeleton coiled around the band, and a pendant shaped like a tiny coffin.
Hibbard's own favourite is a box of Victorian lithographic prints, another reminder that our ancestors were far more comfortable with death imagery than we tend to be. Skulls and skeletons have shown up in art for centuries as symbols of mortality — sometimes sombre, sometimes oddly playful.
For visitors, the appeal is obvious around late October: if you're in London near Halloween, there's a certain pleasure in chasing death-themed art through one of the world's great museums. The V&A rotates its displays, so the best bet is to check what's currently on show or watch the museum's online content, where these pieces have been featured. Entry to the main collection is free, which makes a macabre scavenger hunt through the galleries a very cheap afternoon out.
Who is this for? Anyone bored of the standard London museum checklist. If you've done the Crown Jewels and the Rosetta Stone, hunting down a ruby-eyed skull ring is a more memorable way to spend a few hours — and it pairs nicely with the museum's other eccentric corners, from the jewellery galleries to the theatre collection.
The V&A sits on Cromwell Road in South Kensington, a short walk from the Natural History Museum, so you can bundle both into one day. Go on a weekday morning to dodge the crowds, and leave time for the café — even the building itself is part of the experience.
