Commissioned by Frederick John Horniman and designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, the Horniman Museum opened in 1901. Founded on Horniman's personal collection of natural history specimens and cultural artifacts, which he began to amass in the 1860s, the museum has since grown far beyond its initial bequest and today contains some 350,000 items, with Horniman's objects constituting only ten percent of the ethnographic holdings. Further buildings were added to the museum during the course of the last century, notably in 1911, when a new building was donated by Frederick's son Emslie. In 1999 some of the later additions were demolished to be replaced with a new extension and several associated spaces which opened in 2002.
The Horniman Museum holds three major collections in natural history, musical instruments, and anthropology and archaeology. The museum's ethnographic collection is the third most significant in the United Kingdom, after the British Museum and the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford. It contains approximately 80,000 objects from Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, and the Americas. African objects comprise over twenty-five percent of the total ethnography collection and represent nearly every modern African state. Highlights of the African collection include archaeological materials from Egypt, Benin, and Ethiopia, as well as two Afo figures, an Ibibio figure with suspended sword, and Yoruba and Dogon masks. The American collections have been built through purchases on the part of the Horniman family, as well as donations and transfers from other institutions. Representing a vast geographical range, these objects include material from tribes of the Northwest Coast, Southwest, Plains, and Arctic regions, as well as from pre-Columbian Mexican cultures.
The Horniman's collection of Oceanic art, though significantly smaller than the other ethnographic collections, is an assemblage of remarkable quality. The collection's core was assembled between 1903 and 1915 under supervising curator Alfred Cort Haddon, and subsequent additions have enlarged the collection to include works from all three major sectors of Oceania, with a particular focus on Papua New Guinea. Highlights of the Oceanic holdings include figures and masks from New Ireland, canoes from the Solomon and Cook Islands, and anthropomorphic prow ornaments. The museum's well-documented field collection of thirteen uvol headdresses from the Melkoy people is one of only two of its kind in the United Kingdom, and forms part of the original van Bussal Collection shared between the Museum of African and Oceanic Art in Paris, the Museum für Völkerkunde in Stuttgart, and the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter.
The museum's 32,000-piece collection of Asian art contains works from South, East, Central, and Southeast Asia. Many of these objects were acquired through purchase by Frederick or John Emslie Horniman in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Further groups have been added in the twentieth century, most notably collections of Andaman, Maldive, Borneo, and Naga materials. The Asian holdings also include potentially the largest collection of Asian tents in the United Kingdom, as well as collections of puppets and masks from Nepal, Japan, Sri Lanka, China, and Central Asia.