The Keeper of Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, reputedly the oldest museum in the world, relates the story behind the establishment of the museum. This article is part of a special issue of Eastern Art Report, subtitled 'Eastern Art in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford,' which appeared in EAR's 'Great Museums of the World' series. Contents

James W Allan

The Ashmolean Museum's Oriental Collections: Past, Present and Future

From Eastern Art Report Vol IV No 2

© Eastern Art Report 1995-2001. All rights reserved.

The Ashmolean Museum, which today houses the Oxford University's collection of oriental art, can lay a strong claim to be the world's oldest public museum. The original collection by the John Tradescants senior and junior, royal gardeners to King Charles II, was acquired in 1659 by Elias Ashmole, who in 1677 gave it to Oxford University, further supplementing it by bequest in 1692. The university decided that a building was needed to house it, and so emerged the beautiful little late 17th century building, now the Museum of the History of Science, which stands beside Sir Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre on Broad Street.

The building and the museum it housed opened to the public in 1683. The Tradescant collection laid the foundations of the university's oriental collections as it contained a number of examples of orientalia -- a Burmese Buddha, a couple of Chinese storage jars, Indian and Turkish weapons, Moroccan spurs, tourist trinkets from the Holy Land. As early as 1686 Sir William Hedges of the East India Company presented his Pala stone Vishnu, but the university's collection of eastern artefacts really began to develop with the foundation of the Indian Institute in 1883 by the then Boden Professor of Sanskrit, Sir Monier Monier-Williams. Monier-Williams planned a museum as an integral part of the institute, and secured the help of regional authorities in India to compile large collections of local products. In 1896 an overloaded museum hall and gallery opened to the public for the first time, and this display continued with ups and downs, and the occasional donations, until the end of the Second World War.

In the meantime, in 1845, the Ashmolean moved to its present building, an impressive neo-Grecian piece of architecture on Beaumont Street designed by C R Cockerell. Although the front remains unchanged, the rear of the building has been extended several times during the last century and a half to display, conserve and store the ever-growing university collections of Old World art and archaeology. Gifts and bequests of Chinese ceramics continued to accumulate alongside expanding collections of western art and antiquities, and in 1946 Dr William Cohn, a refugee from Nazi Germany, proposed the amalgamation of the Chinese ceramics and Indian collections in a new Museum of Eastern Art to be housed in the Indian Institute. This opened in 1949, but the days of the Indian Institute were numbered. In 1962 the contents of its museum were moved to a newly built department within the Ashmolean Museum, the Department of Eastern Art, and the institute was abolished. The Eastern Art Department did not include coins. A number of colleges had fine collections, and gradually, from the beginning of this century, these were placed in the Ashmolean. In 1920 the university's collection from the Bodleian Library* was deposited in the Ashmolean on long-term loan and, in 1922, the Heberden Coin Room was finally inaugurated. It has developed into a world-famous centre of numismatic scholarship.

The Ashmolean is part of Oxford University, but its departments receive no financial assistance from the university for the purchase of works of art. They depend on private benefactions for their growth and development, together with financial assistance from national bodies, such as the Museums and Galleries Commission, or from trusts, such as the National Art Collections Fund. In recent years the Friends of the Ashmolean have also played an important part. The roll of honour for the Department of Eastern Art includes a number of individuals whose gifts or bequests have transformed the collections: Mr Charles Drury Fortnum (of the Fortnum and Mason family), Professor A H Sayce, Mr Gaspard Farrer, Mr Francis Mallett, Professor Percy Newberry, Sir Herbert Ingram, Sir Alan Barlow, Mr E H North, Mr Gerald Reitlinger, Mr E M Scratton, Mr and Mrs Douglas Barrett. But there are many others, too numerous to mention and some indeed anonymous, whose smaller gifts have been of great importance within their field of interest and collecting. There have also been patrons, like Eric North and Jeffrey Story, whose generous financial gifts and bequests have provided the department's only regular source of income for purchasing objects, in the latter case specifically for Japanese acquisitions. The Heberden Coin Room's roll of honour, in addition to recent donors mentioned in the article written by Helen Brown and Luke Treadwell, includes Mr J B Elliott, Mr T B Horwood, Mr A C Kay, Mr Uvedale Price, Mr Howel Wills and many more; it owes its most recent post, a part-time assistant keepership of the Islamic coin collection coupled with a university lectureship in Islamic numismatics in the Oriental Faculty, to the generosity of Mr Samir Shamma. The total number of objects in the Eastern Art Department is somewhere in the region of 30,000. It is impossible to show such a large collection, but the department's policy is that every object should be accessible and available. Ceramics, metalwork and glass not on show in the gallery are kept in lit glass-fronted cases in the study storage, where they are regularly used by members of the public and university students.

Plans to build a Print Room, in which the department's collection of paintings and prints can be consulted with equal ease, are now taking shape. It is inevitably, and rightly, the students who most benefit from the size and range of the museum's collections. All the academic staff of the department have teaching or supervisory commitments for the Oriental Studies Faculty of the university, optional papers in art history are available for those studying Chinese, Japanese and Islamic languages, and there is a full range of undergraduate and graduate degree courses in Islamic art and archaeology. Demonstrations or seminars, using the museum's collections, are an integral part of the department's teaching role, and graduate students regularly use specific parts of the collections for writing research papers. In a university museum such as this, not everything may be on show, but nothing is wasted. The Print Room is part of a much larger project to use a well in the centre of the museum to provide much-needed additional space for both the Department of Antiquities and the Department of Eastern Art. The new Print Room will be at mezzanine level. On the ground floor, with its entrance close to the main doors of the museum, will be a new gallery of Japanese decorative arts, the fastest expanding part of the collections, with superb holdings of Japanese export porcelain. Other plans include raising money for a Chinese Painting Gallery -- the department has a very fine collection of 20th century Chinese paintings. This will be the first gallery devoted to Chinese painting in a public museum in Britain. On a wider front, two problems need to be addressed. One is the future location of the department's excellent Eastern Art Library, which acts as both the essential day-to-day resource of the curatorial staff, and as the basic research library for graduate students. It regularly outgrows its allocated space in the department and, like an octopus, spreads its tentacles down the department corridors and into the offices.

On a different front there is a desperate need for a solution to the textile problems faced by the Ashmolean and the university's ethnographic collections at Pitt Rivers Museum. With no curator specialising in textiles, no conservation facilities of the required scale and space, and no members of staff fully trained in textile conservation, there is an urgent need for a visionary approach within the university and a generous source of funding outside it, so that these precious collections can be conserved, studied, and displayed in a way commensurate with their importance. The public often wonder what museum curators do, imagining that we dust the pots, or sit in one of the glass cases. Quite apart from the extraordinary privilege of spending one's years of employment among works of art, a museum curator's job is immensely varied and fulfilling. Our chief duty is towards the collection: to display it in the gallery, or in temporary exhibitions, to ensure it is properly conserved, to keep the cataloguing and computerised database up to date, to know about the collection, to write about it, to interest the public and the student world in it. That is not a problem if you are fascinated by objects: it is almost as if you are paid to do your hobby ! However, even the obsessed can grow weary after long hours in the study storage. In fact there are numerous other activities. Members of the public bring in objects for identification, with fascinating stories of how the particular object came to be in their possession -- a set of Qajar tiles found in the cellar of an old house in Oxfordshire, a 16th century Cairene dish dug out of a river bank in Gloucestershire. A writer needs photographs for a publication, a lecturer some slides to illustrate a historical, or even philosophical, point. Scholars from abroad need to work on objects in the collection: curatorial supervision has to be provided and a suitable space must be found in an already overcrowded department. A museum in the United States requests a loan of a variety of oriental objects for an exhibition, producing a mass of paperwork but also the possibility of a member of staff accompanying the objects as courier. As the date of the next oriental sale draws near, a visit to Sotheby's or Christie's is needed. Though it can be a frustrating experience with so little purchase money available, it does at least keep one in touch with the wider world, the 'market forces', and even the occasional fake. University terms are particularly busy times in the museum: faculty and museum committee meetings are crowded into these eight- week periods, lectures and seminars have to be given, tours for this year's 'freshers', and students wander in and out, sometimes needing simply the title of a relevant book or article, at other times a discussion on an art historical point that has fired their imagination. And behind all this is a programme of research, the need of each curator to keep up to date with the relevant literature and to pursue his or her own course of study and writing. When the telephone rings every 10 minutes any attempt at research can be a dead loss, but occasionally, particularly in the summer vacation, peace reigns, and articles, like this one, get written !

James Allan was educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and was appointed an assistant keeper in the Ashmolean Museum's Department of Eastern Art in 1966, four years after the department was created. He became the Keeper of Eastern Art in 1991, succeeding Miss Mary Tregear, the authority on Chinese art. Dr Allan's publications include Islamic Metalwork: The Nuhad es-Said Collection (1982) and a revised and augmented edition of K A C Creswell's A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture (1989). He has been responsible for founding the M Phil in Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Oxford. An extensive Eastern Art Report interview with Dr Allan appeared in EAR Vol III No 3.

Contents of 'Eastern Art in the Ashmolean Museum'

• James W Allan: The Ashmolean Museum's Oriental Collections: Past, Present and Future
• Oliver Impey: Arita Blue and White -- Evolution and Development in the 17th Century
• James W Allan: Isfahan, Canton, Etruria -- Persia and the China Trade in the 18th & 19th Centuries
• Shelagh Vainker: Centuries of Seals -- The Eric North Bequest to the Ashmolean Museum
• Chuimei Ho: Opulence, Luxury and Style -- Life of the Aristocrat in Qing Dynasty China
• Helen Brown and Luke Treadwell: A Collection on the Move -- Oriental Acquisitions of the Heberden Coin Room
• David Armitage: Restoration and Repair of Oriental Ceramics through the Millennia
• Crispin Branfoot: Burmese Nats -- Wooden Sculpture from the Richard C Temple Collection
• Teresa Fitzherbert: Preserving the Legacy of Islamic Art and Architecture Photographic Collections
• Ruth Barnes: From Riches to Rags: Indian Printed Cotton Textiles in the Ashmolean [with inset] A Society for Asian Textiles in Oxford
• Andrew Topsfield: Indian Paintings in the Ashmolean and Bodleian Library Collections
• Marianne Ellis: Threads of History -- Embroideries from Egypt in the Newberry Collection

Other articles, not related to the Ashmolean Museum

• Sajid Rizvi: The Khalili Collecton: Marvels of Meiji Japan -- from a Consummate Collector of Islamic Art
• International Diary
• Previews & Reviews
• Forum
• Marketplace
• Books
• Art Events Worldwide
• Index to Back Issues

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