Spanning some 350 years, the Thomson Collection of historic ship models contains examples of exquisite workmanship and some of the masterpieces of the genre. Pride of the collection are the rare British dockyard models made to scale for affluent 18th-century clients closely associated with the Navy. A large number of models—made from wood and bone, with rigging of human hair—were made by some of the 120,000 French and other prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars.