Director The Quay Brothers
Librarian Steven Quay
Animation The Quay Brothers
Music Gary Tarn
Producer Keith Griffiths

The Phantom Museum provides a random foray and idiosyncratic journey through the bizarre private medical collection of Sir Henry Wellcome.

The Phantom Museum was supported by the Wellcome Trust for inclusion in their exhibition on Henry Wellcome’s unique collection, staged at the British Museum during June–November 2003. The website for this Medicine Man exhibition provides two streamed extracts from the film.

Sir Henry Wellcome (1853–1936) amassed one of the world’s largest museum collections ever to capture human culture and history through medical eyes. The Phantom Museum uses animation to ‘document’ imaginatively this extraordinary assemblage and simultaneously reveal an extremely beautiful yet odd inner cosmos of things.


The Phantom Museum provides a random foray and idiosyncratic journey through the bizarre private medical collection of Sir Henry Wellcome and in particular that part kept by the Science Museum at Blythe House. The film plays with an idea that all passionate museum visitors know to be true: that the objects become even more interesting after the last visitor has left the gallery.

Shot on 35mm and 8mm, part animated within studio and part in the backrooms of a London museum.