Ashmolean Museum

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The most important of the museums belonging to the University of Oxford. It is named after the antiquary Elias Ashmole (1617–92), who in 1675 offered his collection to the university as a gesture of ‘filial respect’. The collection had been largely formed by John Tradescant the Elder (c.1570–1638) and his son John the Younger (1608–62), gardeners and travellers. They assembled a remarkable ‘closet of rarities’ (a collection of curiosities rather than works of art), which John the Younger gave to his friend Ashmole in 1659. Ashmole stipulated that a building should be erected to house the collection, and this was constructed in 1679–83, probably to the design of Thomas Wood, a local mason and sculptor (although it has sometimes been groundlessly attributed to Christopher Wren). When it opened in 1683 it was the first public museum in Britain.

Throughout most of the 18th century the museum was neglected, but it began to receive more attention in the early 19th century, as did other collections of objects that had come into the university's possession in various ways—often through the bequests of former students like Ashmole. It was decided to create a new and much larger museum to house them, and this—an impressive Neoclassical building, designed by C. R. Cockerell—opened in 1845; at this time it was known as the University Galleries. The new museum soon attracted additional bequests, including a collection of 40 Italian paintings (among them Uccello's celebrated Hunt in the Forest) presented in 1850 by William Fox-Strangways (1795–1865), later 4th Earl of Ilchester; he had spent several years in Italy during his career as a diplomat and the pictures he bought there were mainly of the 14th and 15th centuries—a period of Italian art which at this time was much less fashionable than the later years of the Renaissance. An extension to the building was opened in 1894, and the institution was renamed the Ashmolean Museum in 1899. In 1908 it was formally titled the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology; the original building is now known as the ‘Old Ashmolean Building’ and houses the Museum of the History of Science.

Little of the Tradescant–Ashmole collection remains in the Ashmolean, having been distributed to other institutions (the famous stuffed dodo that was an inspiration to Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland is now in the University Museum, opened in 1860, which is devoted to natural history). The Ashmolean has four departments—Western Art, Eastern Art, Antiquities, and Coins—and has great riches in all of them. Among the antiquities are marbles from the collection formed by Lord Arundel in the 17th century, and the Old Master drawings include a superlative representation of Michelangelo and Raphael from the collection of Sir Thomas Lawrence.