The Ashmolean revived
Equally important, the old Ashmolean has emerged from the many months of closure, dust and scaffolding not only unscathed but enhanced. The original museum is itself as precious as any of the remarkable works of art that it contains. Completed in 1845, to the designs of Charles Cockerell, and inspired by the temples of ancient Rome, it is arguably the last great Neoclassical building to have been erected in England.
The redevelopment of the Ashmolean was the brainchild of current director, Christopher Brown. It opens yet another chapter in the long and eventful life of a unique institution. The museum’s origins can be traced back to the curiosity of a single man, John Tradescant the Elder. A contemporary of Shakespeare, Tradescant was a pioneer in the fields of botany and gardening. Born into the first great age of global exploration, he ranged far and wide in search of rare plants and shrubs. Along the way, he developed an insatiable appetite for collecting all kinds of other things too: the skeletons of exotic animals, rare shells, artefacts fashioned by the peoples he encountered on his travels to Russia, Africa and the West Indies. His son, who was one of the earliest English settlers in Virginia, also developed the collecting habit. By the 1630s, when Tradescant was appointed Charles I’s “Keeper of Gardens, Vines and Silkworms”, his house in Lambeth had metamorphosed into a single great cabinet of curiosities.
The king’s gardener called his house “the Ark” and thought of his collection as a microcosm of the known world. He opened it to the public, charging a modest entrance fee and making it clear that everyone was welcome, regardless of social class. It was the world’s first public museum. In 1634, a visitor named Peter Mundy wrote that he had been “to view some rarities at John Tradescants ... beasts, fowle, fishes, serpents ... armes, coines, shells, feathers...” They had been supplied, he noted, by Tradescant’s extensive network of curiosity-finders, including “noblemen, gentlemen, sea-commanders.” So bewilderingly extensive was Tradescant’s collection that Mundy was “almost perswaded a man might in one daye behold and collecte into one place more curiosities than hee should see if hee spent all his life in Travell...”
The story darkens somewhat with the arrival on the scene of Elias Ashmole, a silver-tongued lawyer who dabbled in astrology and alchemy as well as helping to found the Royal Society. Deeply impressed by Tradescant’s museum, Ashmole wrote the first catalogue of its contents and set his heart on making the collection his own. He persuaded Tradescant to sign it over to him, but the family subsequently resisted Ashmole’s attempts to enforce the bequest. Eventually the collection passed to the widow of Tradescant’s son. Ashmole harrassed her with fierce determination, not only buying the house next-door to hers but even going to the lengths of knocking a hole through the party wall so that he could keep an eye on “his” collection. In one way or another, he hounded her to her death. In 1678, Hester Tradescant drowned in the shallow waters of her own duckpond. Some thought it was suicide. Others suspected murder. Whatever the truth, Ashmole inherited the collection and renamed it after himself. He later donated it to Oxford University.
Bequest after bequest, gift after gift, and a multitude of subsequent acquisitions have transformed the original “Ark”. Over the course of nearly four centuries, the seed planted by Tradescant and watered by Ashmole’s ambition has grown into the world’s greatest university museum of art and archaeology. The modern Ashmolean houses exceptional collections of painting and sculpture, including Renaissance masterpieces such as Paolo Uccello’s vividly batty demonstration of single-point perspective, The Night Hunt, and a recently rediscovered painting by Titian, a ruddy-cheeked putto allegorically enacting the motto Omnia Vincit Amor (“Love conquers all”). It contains the largest pre-Dynastic collection of Egyptian material in Britain; the only Minoan collection in the country; brilliant Anglo-Saxon objects and works of art, including the priceless “Alfred Jewel”; and exceptional works on paper, including the largest group of drawings by Raphael anywhere in the world.
Date: 01-11-2009
Owning Institution: Ashmolean
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010
Subject:
16th Century 17th Century 18th Century 19th Century 20th Century Now
Next Saturday the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford will reopen following the completion of a £61 million pound redevelopment. Rick Mather’s bright and spacious new extension is dominated by a grand central stairway, elegantly drawn in ziggurat lines of steel and glass on a tabula rasa of clean white walls. This high modernist Trojan horse has been cunningly inserted behind the grand facade of the existing museum, more than doubling the existing display area. It also provides a sequence of tall and generous galleries for temporary exhibitions and a glass-fronted rooftop restaurant with views across the city and its spires.
Equally important, the old Ashmolean has emerged from the many months of closure, dust and scaffolding not only unscathed but enhanced. The original museum is itself as precious as any of the remarkable works of art that it contains. Completed in 1845, to the designs of Charles Cockerell, and inspired by the temples of ancient Rome, it is arguably the last great Neoclassical building to have been erected in England.
The redevelopment of the Ashmolean was the brainchild of current director, Christopher Brown. It opens yet another chapter in the long and eventful life of a unique institution. The museum’s origins can be traced back to the curiosity of a single man, John Tradescant the Elder. A contemporary of Shakespeare, Tradescant was a pioneer in the fields of botany and gardening. Born into the first great age of global exploration, he ranged far and wide in search of rare plants and shrubs. Along the way, he developed an insatiable appetite for collecting all kinds of other things too: the skeletons of exotic animals, rare shells, artefacts fashioned by the peoples he encountered on his travels to Russia, Africa and the West Indies. His son, who was one of the earliest English settlers in Virginia, also developed the collecting habit. By the 1630s, when Tradescant was appointed Charles I’s “Keeper of Gardens, Vines and Silkworms”, his house in Lambeth had metamorphosed into a single great cabinet of curiosities.
The king’s gardener called his house “the Ark” and thought of his collection as a microcosm of the known world. He opened it to the public, charging a modest entrance fee and making it clear that everyone was welcome, regardless of social class. It was the world’s first public museum. In 1634, a visitor named Peter Mundy wrote that he had been “to view some rarities at John Tradescants ... beasts, fowle, fishes, serpents ... armes, coines, shells, feathers...” They had been supplied, he noted, by Tradescant’s extensive network of curiosity-finders, including “noblemen, gentlemen, sea-commanders.” So bewilderingly extensive was Tradescant’s collection that Mundy was “almost perswaded a man might in one daye behold and collecte into one place more curiosities than hee should see if hee spent all his life in Travell...”
The story darkens somewhat with the arrival on the scene of Elias Ashmole, a silver-tongued lawyer who dabbled in astrology and alchemy as well as helping to found the Royal Society. Deeply impressed by Tradescant’s museum, Ashmole wrote the first catalogue of its contents and set his heart on making the collection his own. He persuaded Tradescant to sign it over to him, but the family subsequently resisted Ashmole’s attempts to enforce the bequest. Eventually the collection passed to the widow of Tradescant’s son. Ashmole harrassed her with fierce determination, not only buying the house next-door to hers but even going to the lengths of knocking a hole through the party wall so that he could keep an eye on “his” collection. In one way or another, he hounded her to her death. In 1678, Hester Tradescant drowned in the shallow waters of her own duckpond. Some thought it was suicide. Others suspected murder. Whatever the truth, Ashmole inherited the collection and renamed it after himself. He later donated it to Oxford University.
Bequest after bequest, gift after gift, and a multitude of subsequent acquisitions have transformed the original “Ark”. Over the course of nearly four centuries, the seed planted by Tradescant and watered by Ashmole’s ambition has grown into the world’s greatest university museum of art and archaeology. The modern Ashmolean houses exceptional collections of painting and sculpture, including Renaissance masterpieces such as Paolo Uccello’s vividly batty demonstration of single-point perspective, The Night Hunt, and a recently rediscovered painting by Titian, a ruddy-cheeked putto allegorically enacting the motto Omnia Vincit Amor (“Love conquers all”). It contains the largest pre-Dynastic collection of Egyptian material in Britain; the only Minoan collection in the country; brilliant Anglo-Saxon objects and works of art, including the priceless “Alfred Jewel”; and exceptional works on paper, including the largest group of drawings by Raphael anywhere in the world.
The redevelopment of the museum means that many more of its treasures can be displayed than ever before. The adoption of a broadly chronological display also means that the various collections speak to one another more coherently than they did under the previous, purely departmental arrangement of material. In the new dispensation, it is much easier for visitors to explore and understand the links between, say, the Asian and the ancient Roman collections.
But the new Ashmolean is not quite so dispassionately logical as to have forgotten its own past. At the centre of the new display a single room is devoted to the old Lambeth “Ark”, and the spirit of unbrideld curiosity that brought it into being. The display includes a pair of ball-headed clubs in the form of snakes, once wielded by Mohican warriors, which are among the earliest Native American objects ever brought to the west. It also includes the ultimate Bonfire Night relic, the actual lantern Guy Fawkes had in his hand when surprised in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament – an object donated in 1641, by the son of the very man who arrested Fawkes and foiled the Gunpowder Plot. The Ashmolean might have metamorphosed into a thoroughly modern museum, but the eccentric heart of John Tradescant still beats deep within the building.
But the new Ashmolean is not quite so dispassionately logical as to have forgotten its own past. At the centre of the new display a single room is devoted to the old Lambeth “Ark”, and the spirit of unbrideld curiosity that brought it into being. The display includes a pair of ball-headed clubs in the form of snakes, once wielded by Mohican warriors, which are among the earliest Native American objects ever brought to the west. It also includes the ultimate Bonfire Night relic, the actual lantern Guy Fawkes had in his hand when surprised in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament – an object donated in 1641, by the son of the very man who arrested Fawkes and foiled the Gunpowder Plot. The Ashmolean might have metamorphosed into a thoroughly modern museum, but the eccentric heart of John Tradescant still beats deep within the building.
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