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Monday, September 6, 2010

Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

Long on the list to visit was this museum of archaeology and anthropology which has a somewhat unusual piggy-back arrangement with the Oxford Museum of Natural History (OMNH). The Pitt Rivers and the OMNH are both just outside the centre of Oxford on Parks Road which is at the end of Broad Street, a gentle 10/15 minute stroll from the centre of Oxford. I mention this as there is no car parking (except for limited disabled spaces) on site so Shanks Mare or the local or tourist bus services are the way to go. Both museums are part of the University of Oxfordand like all the renowned museums in the City of the Dreaming Spires they can appear somewhat cluttered as they were primarily created for teaching and research.

Pitt Rivers Museum

With so much learning going on Oxford contains many homes to the Muses or Museums to give them their more familiar title. There is the Pitts River Museum, The Museum of Oxford, The Museum of the History of Science, The Bates Collection of Musical Instruments, The Christchurch Picture Gallery and The Oxford Museum of Natural History. Oxford's museums and collections are world renowned. They provide an important resource for scholars around the world, and welcome visits from members of the public. More than a million people visit the University’s museums and collections every year.

The Pitt Rivers Museum is located within the Oxford Museum of Natural History housed in a wonderful Victorian Cathedral to science and knowledge. The neo-Gothic building was designed by the Irish architects Thomas Newenham Deane and Benjamin Woodward who also designed the Museum Building in Trinity College, Dublin. The museum's design was directly influenced by the writings of critic John Ruskin, who involved himself by making various suggestions to Woodward during construction.

The museum consists of a large square court with a glass roof, supported by cast iron pillars, which divide the court into three aisles. Cloistered arcades run around the ground and first floor of the building, with stone columns each made from a different British stone, selected by geologist John Phillips (the Keeper of the Museum). The ornamentation of the stonework and iron pillars incorporates natural forms such as leaves and branches, combining the Pre-Raphaelite style with the scientific role of the building.

Oxford dinosaurs - footprints outside the museum!

Pitt Rivers Museum holds one of the world’s finest collections of anthropology and archaeology, with objects from every continent and from throughout human history.

University Museum of Natural History houses the University's scientific collections of zoological, entomological, palaeontological and mineral specimens. With 4.5 million specimens it is the largest collection of its type outside of the national collections. The Museum itself is a Grade 1 listed building, renowned for its spectacular neo-Gothic architecture. Among its most famous features are the Oxfordshire dinosaurs, the dodo, and the swifts in the tower.

The Museum was designed as a 'cathedral to science', and home to the University's scientific collections. It represents a spectacular example of neo-Gothic architecture and has an illustrious history. It played host to the famous evolutionary debate between Huxley and Wilberforce in 1860, and is now known for many famous features - the Oxfordshire dinosaurs, the dodo, Alice, and the swifts.

In June 1860 the newly opened Oxford University Museum of Natural History hosted one of the most famous debates in scientific history. It was the ‘great debate’ between Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and Thomas Huxley, the biologist and writer. They argued furiously about Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and the questions it raised about man’s place in the natural world and religious belief. Darwin himself was not well enough to attend the debate but Huxley was nicknamed ‘Darwin’s bull-dog’ for his ardent defence of Darwin’s work. Today the Museum displays a statue of Darwin and some of the crabs he collected during his voyage on the Beagle.

Display of tree roots in museum forecourt

The Pitt Rivers Museum was founded in 1884 when Lt.-General Pitt Rivers, an influential figure in the development of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology, gave his collection to the University. His two conditions were that a museum was built to house it and that someone should be appointed to lecture in anthropology.

The Museum displays archaeological and ethnographic objects from all parts of the world. The General's founding gift contained more than 18,000 objects but there are now over half a million. Many were donated by early anthropologists and explorers. The extensive photographic and sound archives contain early records of great importance. Today the Museum is an active teaching department of the University of Oxford. It also continues to collect through donations, bequests, special purchases and through its students, in the course of their fieldwork.

Permanent displays in the Museum are ethnographic and archaeological and include the following:

Pacific island objects, including a magnificent Tahitian mourner's costume, collected during Captain Cook's Second Voyage in 1773-74; Hawaiian feather cloaks in brilliant shades of red and yellow; a wide range of hand-woven textiles and looms; a collection of ceremonial brasses and ivories from the Kingdom of Benin; a fine group of early masks worn by actors in Japanese Noh dramas; more masks from Africa, Melanesia and North America; sculpture from all over the world in wood, pottery, metal and stone; boats, ranging from full-sized sailing craft to model canoes; baskets in all possible shapes and sizes; pottery from Africa and the Americas, including many pre-Columbian pieces; costumes from North America including Inuit fur parkas, Plains skin shirts decorated with porcupine quills, painted coats from the North-eastern Woodlands and a range of decorated moccasins; magic objects including amulets and charms; jewellery and body decoration; locks and keys; tools and weapons; musical instruments.

Some old dinosaurs

In most ethnographic and archaeological museums the displays are arranged according to geographical or cultural areas. Here they are arranged according to type: musical instruments, weapons, masks, textiles, jewellery, and tools are all displayed in groups to show how the same problems have been solved at different times by different peoples. The cases appear to be very crowded, as a very large percentage of the collection is on view. In some instances the 'displays' are primarily visible storage, due to the museum being first and foremost a teaching and research institution and the curators are also university lecturers in either cultural anthropology or prehistoric archaeology. A number of degree courses are taught to both graduate and undergraduate studies. If you look carefully you will see that actually a great deal of information is provided about individual objects. The small labels, many of them hand printed by the first Curator, are very revealing.

The Oxford Dodo

Today, the head and foot of a Dodo displayed at the museum are the most complete remains of a single dodo anywhere in the world. Many museums have complete Dodo skeletons, but these are composed of the bones of several individuals. The museum also displays a 1651 painting of a Dodo by Flemish artist, Jan Savery. Charles Dodgson, better known by his pen-name Lewis Carroll, was a regular visitor to the museum, and Savery's painting is likely to have influenced the character of the Dodo in Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The Alice display with many of the characters being based on exhibits in the museum

The Pitt Rivers museum was closed for almost a year recently for major renovations reopening on 1st May 2009. In this work, the 1960s exhibition gallery was dismantled, restoring the original view through to the Museum’s totem pole. Original display cases were returned to their original place at the front of the Museum. The space upstairs vacated by these cases provides additional space for the Clore Duffield Education Centre where many educational events are run for children including visiting school parties. A new entrance platform allows visitors to enter on the same level as the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and improves access for wheelchair users and parents with pushchairs. The entrance platform provides re-located shop and reception areas. An environmental control system has also been installed.

Now visitors to the reopened museum are issued with little wind-up electric torches, for this great anthropological collection of artifacts resembles, in a way, a mine of treasures in a series of shady galleries, with a central cavern where the tin edgings of ancient handwritten labels wink under the artificial light. Visitors here are self-directed, not led by the nanny's hand of explanatory panels. They can make their own connections, open endless scallop-handled drawers tucked beneath display cases, trace the stories they choose in the crowds of objects.

The Pitt Rivers is a museum unlike any other in the quality, density and variety of the items on display. It is worth spending time here for it provokes in its visitors young and old a deep wonder, at the variety and underlying common humanity of cultural solutions to everyday problems: music-making, sewing, hunting, fire-making, sitting, sawing, locking, and healing. For the great key to the Pitt Rivers is its thematic arrangement and this enables you to see similar objects from (say) Africa, Asia, Native Americans and the Middle East and marvel at both the variety and convergence in human cultures and solutions to the challenges of living. Each exhibit, in this Noah's Ark of all the Earth's artefacts, is a wormhole out of the museum and into the lives of the culture that made it. Follow the connections and you will be able to make out what makes human beings tick. It is a fascinating journey and the genius of the Pitt Rivers and Natural History Museums is it will be uniquely YOUR journey.

T Rex

Oxford still casts its spell and seems a unique place in this world. A busy town, a wealthy town whose house prices match London, a working town where the tradition of motor car manufacture pioneered by Morris Garages (MG) is kept alive at the Mini Plant at Cowley. But it is a City with a different demographic, where you can wander through the world’s biggest university bookshop, wander among its 39 Colleges and its Halls with associated libraries, laboratories and playing fields. It is an International City with students, staff, researchers and tourists from across the globe. A cultured city where you can go to six museums or at least 10 classical concerts on any given day.

Make sure on your visit you head slightly out of the centre to visit the unique treasure casket which is the Pitt Rivers Museum. Otherwise, you will not have seen Oxford!

Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PW.

Tel; 01865 270927

10.00 - 16.30 Tuesday to Sunday
(and bank holiday Mondays)

12.00 - 16.30 Monday

Website; www.prm.ox.ac.uk

See also;

Ashmolean Museum

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/11/oxfords-ashmolean-museum.html

A day in Oxford

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/04/day-in-oxford.html

Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

Friday, November 6, 2009

Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum

Regular blogistas will know that my favourite English City is the “City of the Dreaming Spires” the university city of Oxford. With so much learning going on Oxford contains many homes to the Muses or Museums to give them their more familiar title. There is the Pitts River Museum, The Museum of Oxford, The Museum of the History of Science, The Bates Collection of Musical Instruments, The Christchurch Picture Gallery and The Oxford Museum of Natural History. Oxford's museums and collections are world renowned. They provide an important resource for scholars around the world, and welcome visits from members of the public. More than a million people visit the University’s museums and collections every year. For me from all this abundance of riches one of my favourite places to visit is what has been the somewhat forbidding and eccentric Ashmolean Museum.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/04/day-in-oxford.html

Elias Ashmole

At its opening in 1683, the Ashmolean was the world’s first ever public museum, a beacon of learning for a newly scientific age. Over the centuries, as an integral part of the University of Oxford, it has remained at the forefront of modern thinking on how museums can best foster learning, while giving enjoyment and inspiration to the widest possible audience. In the best tradition of Regency “Cabinet of Curios” it has always contained popular attractions like the Guy Fawkes lantern to recent acquisitions like the restored Titian painting “The Triumph of Love.”

Aerial view - The Ashmolean with the extension behind.

The renovated Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology re-opens to the public on Saturday 7 November. The award-winning architect Rick Mather has designed a new building, replacing all but the Grade I listed Cockerell building. The redevelopment cost £61m, doubling the existing gallery space. The new building will provide the Ashmolean with 100% more display space. Located to the north of Charles Cockerell’s original Museum built in 1845, it comprises 39 new galleries, including 4 temporary exhibition galleries, a new education centre, state-of-the-art conservation studios, and Oxford’s first rooftop restaurant The Ashmolean Dining Room. In the Cockerell Building, the newly refurbished galleries of Western Art will reopen after 10 months of closure.

Behind its classically pedimented exterior the Ashmolean was a strange design for the entrance led you to expect something huge and dramatic behind but the reality was a museum only one gallery deep where parts were immersed in a stygian gloom. Rich Mather’s clever extension addresses this and much more with all galleries now leading onto a bright atrium. These changes mark the latest upgrades to the UK's oldest public museum, with its origins dating back to the early 17th Century.

Titian “The Triumph of Love.”

The original museum of 1683 was based on the collections of Elias Ashmole, alchemist and antiquarian, a leading figure of "The New Philosophy". It was literally a "cabinet of curios", including a Dodo, artefacts acquired from credulous Native Americans and hand-me-downs from the Tradescants. Ashmole explained that his purpose was to encourage "the inspection of particulars… extraordinary in their fabrick". By the early 18th century it was already a busy popular museum. Elias Ashmole was an aficionado of antiquities who studied at the University of Oxford whilst posted to the military there. He was one of the first gentleman freemasons in England and had wide ranging interests including astrology and alchemy.

Staying a head

He liked to collect coins, metal, books and manuscripts and he apparently possessed the secret of the Philosopher's Stone (one of the great alchemical secrets). Ashmole was also a founder member of the Royal Society, interested in the study of nature and objects and their application to the benefit of mankind.

Lawrence of Arabia's robes

But the choice of his name for the museum is not without controversy. David Berry, project curator of the Ashmolean tells the full story: "The museum opened to the public officially in 1683 but its history is traced further back. "The collection that was its core was compiled by two John Tradescants, father and son. They were gardeners to Charles I, and in the late 1620s John Sr took out a lease on a house in South Lambeth. 1634 is the first recorded instance of a visitor having seen that material. It was really the first instance where a collection of that sort - what would be referred to as a Cabinet of Curiosities - was made accessible to the general public regardless of age, gender or status. That is unique to them and one of the things that Ashmole inherited. It became a key foundational element of the Ashmolean when it opened here in Oxford."

"The Ark", as it was known, caught Ashmole's attention when he purchased the house next door: "He had an interest in the Tradescant collection. In 1656 he paid for and was in large part responsible for helping to compile a catalogue of it. It was the first printed catalogue of a museum collection or a collection of any sort in England." Many people make the comment that it should rightfully be the Tradescant Museum as opposed to the Ashmolean - it's an interesting point.

Museum of Science, Oxford

When John Tradescant III died at an early age, in the absence of an heir the future of the collection seemed in jeopardy. In 1659 the collection was passed to Ashmole by Deed of Gift. But it seems that John Tradescant the Younger regretted this, and he left everything in his will to his wife. This led to a court case upon his death. The deed proved valid and Ashmole won the case. In 1657 Ashmole began negotiations with his former university. A museum was built on Broad Street (now the Museum of the History of Science). It opened in 1683 and housed the Tradescant collection.

"Ashmole is very often vilified for his role in this," David Berry continues. "Many people make the comment that it should rightfully be the Tradescant Museum as opposed to the Ashmolean. It's an interesting point. "The bulk of the material that he donated and that arrived and was open to the public had a Tradescant provenance. Ashmole was a major collector in his own right but quite a bit of that burned in a fire in his chambers in Middle Temple. But the institution is entirely Ashmole's. It was through his influence that the university was persuaded to build the building. Ashmole gave it its proper philosophical foundation. He provided it with a series of statutes by which it was to run. In a sense the right name is on the front door. The collection in terms of what survived is largely Tradescant's and Ashmole was actually quite clear about that in his correspondence with the university. He also donated all of the family portraits. We have a dozen or more portraits of the members of the Tradescant family which all very clearly say on them 'Donated by Elias Ashmole'. He would not have done that had he not intended for their legacy to be preserved as well as his own."

Guy Fawkes Lamp

Over the years the museum rapidly began to run out of space. In the mid 19th century the university's collections were subject to a "process of rationalisation". The museum was originally conceived to represent the world in microcosm, crossing cultures, times and disciplines (the epitaph on the Tradescant tomb even reads "a world of wonders in one closet shop"). But in the quickly developing 19th century, the sciences were dividing into many different disciplines and the collections had to expand in line with them.

Main Staircase & Atrium

Eventually the 1860s saw the natural history collections transferred to Parks Road where they formed the core of the University Museum - now the Oxford Museum of Natural History. Once the Tradescant collection was moved to the Pitt Rivers Museum in the 1880s the museum was left with something of a crisis of identity. David Berry describes the museum's new change of direction: "the focus shifted almost entirely to the area of archaeology. The museum began to acquire significant holdings of material from Egypt, the Near East, from throughout Continental Europe as well as archaeological material from throughout the British Isles and the classical world."

By this time the University Galleries, housed in a neo-classical building in Beaumont Street, had been displaying many fine examples of paintings, sculpture, drawings and prints. The treasures of the Ashmolean, which had outgrown the space on Broad Street, were moved to an extension at the back of the newer building. It was in 1908 that the two institutions amalgamated to form the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. This is the museum we have today, albeit now with a new and improved modern makeover.

Statue of Caesar Augustus

Inside the new galleries, the Ashmolean presents a redisplay of the collections. The Museum’s curators have worked with leading design company Metaphor to create the innovative strategy Crossing Cultures Crossing Time, enabling visitors to discover how civilisations developed as part of an interrelated world culture. Objects’ stories will be told by tracing the journey of ideas and influences through time and across continents, transforming the way the Ashmolean’s rare and beautiful objects are understood.

Themed galleries on the lower ground floor explore the connections between objects and activities common to different cultures, such as money, reading and writing, and the representation of the human image. The floors above are arranged chronologically, charting the development of the ancient and modern worlds. Orientation galleries on each floor introduce the key themes, illuminating the many connections and comparisons which bring the past to life.

Strangely for a University City Oxford has been somewhat bereft of good restaurants, one exception has been the excellent Brasserie Blanc in the atmospheric Oxford canal side district of Jericho.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/12/brasserie-blanc.html

This may sound surprising but every college has its dining hall where Fellows and Scholars sit down to “Commons” and every college has its Student Buttery. The Oxfordshire squirearchy for their part largely stay in the county frequenting country taverns and Blanc’s exquisite Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons at little Milton. This leaves Oxford City itself abandoned to the chains, fast food and tourist specials. Two honourable exceptions have been the excellent operation in the crypt of St. Mary’s University Church and the Ashmolean Café. The Café features freshly-baked pastries and organic yoghurts for breakfast and a range of tasty sandwiches, soups and salads for a light lunch. Highlights from the cakes and desserts menu include the orange and almond cake and wholesome muffins made each morning at the benugo bakery. The bakery offer is exceptional. A new addition in the renovated museum is The Ashmolean Dining Room which provides the spectacular setting for Oxford’s first rooftop restaurant.

Now the Ashmolean is pretty much uncontested as the greatest university museum in the world. The fact that this enchanting museum is also an active seat of research and scholarship only adds to its lustre, while the reality of seeing so many objects – squirreled away for too many years – out on display will make the Ashmolean a museum to return to, time and again. Go and see the reborn Ashmolean soon, an exceptional place in an exceptional city.

See also; Xmas in Oxford

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/12/xmas-is-coming.html

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