Treasures of the Ashmolean Museum

The Ashmolean Museum, founded in 1683, has strong claims to be the oldest surviving institutional museum open to the public, yet, it is also the private museum of the University of Oxford. Over the centuries a continuing pattern of generous benefaction has accumulated astonishing collections in the university, and those in the fields of art and archaeology are concentrated in the Ashmolean. They range in time, from finds seven or eight thousand years old to 20th-century masterpieces. This illustrated volume provides examples of: Early-Chinese bronzes, Ancient Egyptian artefacts, sculptures and coins from classical Greece and Rome, Anglo-Saxon glass, Chinese porcelain, Indian sculpture and manuscript illustration, Islamic ceramics and Japanese screen paintings. Over half the volume is devoted to reproductions from the museum's magnificent holdings of European art - silver, maiolica, porcelain, bronzes and marbles - together with paintings, watercolours and drawings. Works by Giotto, Giorgione, Uccello and Raphael, by Rembrandt and Rubens, by the French Impressionists and by English artists from Gainsborough to Stanley Spencer. The late Sir David Piper, Director of the Ashmolean Museum from 1973-85, compiled the original edition prior to his retirements in 1985. This new edition illustrates additional artefacts, paintings and drawings acquired by the museum during the last decade, selected and described by the present Director, Professor Christopher White.