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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