The Ashmolean, a collection of collections - Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford, England

Magazine Antiques, June, 2002 by Maureen Mellor

The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology is housed in an impressive neo-Grecian building designed by Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863) in 1845, which remains one of the most imposing buildings in Oxford. It was built as the University Galleries to house paintings, prints, drawings, and antiquities. Today, many of the collections are among the finest of their kind, drawing visitors from all over the world. The museum itself was established in 1683 in a smaller building nearby and is the oldest public museum in Great Britain, and perhaps the world. The collection ranges from flint instruments made about half a million years ago to twentieth-century ceramics, metalwork, glass, paintings, and prints. (1) The museum is supported by private benefactors as well as awards from national entities. In recent years the Friends of the Ashmolean have also played an important part. The majority of the museum's major collections were donated or bequeathed by individuals. The connoisseurship of the original owners and the stories behind their collections humanize the galleries that house the objects. The collections are gradually being made available to a wide public through the publication of handbooks, and now the ceramic collections will be displayed to a global audience through the World Wide Web. (2)

Among the donors whose gifts have transformed the museum are a gardener, a grocer, a chemist, a schoolboy, a financier and a writer. The gardener was actually two gardeners, father and son, both named John Tradescant, and both gardeners to Charles I (r. 1625-1649). The father (P1. VI) collected flowers, shrubs, vines, and fruit trees in Europe, while his son ventured as far as Virginia on more than one occasion. They were also antiquarians, and in this way contributed to the Ashmolean. Among their many treasures were two seventeenth-century high-fired Chinese storage jars, two Roman jars excavated in Britain, and an Anglo-Saxon burial urn, all on display today in the Tradescant Room.

Charles Drury Edward Fortnum was the last of the Fortnums of Fortnum and Mason, grocers, in Piccadilly, London (see P1. X). He was also one of the principal ceramics scholars of the Victorian age. (3) By marrying successively two second cousins, who were themselves heiresses of the same grocery business, he consolidated his fortune to the benefit of his collection, since both marriages were childless.

Fortnum's publications include the first catalogues of maiolica (1873) and bronzes (1875) in the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in London, which established him as one of the leading authorities in Europe. He presented papers on ceramics before London's Society of Antiquaries, of which he was a fellow and later vice president. His friendship with John Henry Parker (1806-1884) and later Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941), both keepers at the Ashmolean, resulted in his donation to the museum of his outstanding collection of Renaissance decorative arts objects. At that time Oxford was still dominated by the pursuit of classical antiquities, and Fortnum saw himself as the champion of the Renaissance in preference to "classical abominations" (4) such as the one shown in Plate III. His love for the Italian Renaissance extended to Islamic ceramics, including Spanish lusterware. Indeed, he was among the first to bring Islamic ceramics to the attention of British connoisseurs and museums. He wa s also a pioneer in researching the history of Islamic pottery. (5)

Fortnum's important bronzes, anger rings, and Italian maiolica (see P1. II), all of which came to the museum together with financial support, gained him the epithet of "second founder of the Ashmolean." (6) His papers, also deposited in the museum, are one of the richest resources about collecting in Victorian England.

His ceramic collection was largely formed from the 1850s into the 1870s. He made his first purchase in Florence in 1851, a maiolica dish of 1500-1520, the same year that Augustus Wollaston Franks (1826-1897) first acquired similar ceramics for the British Museum in London. Fortnum's principal sources were dealers in Paris, Italy Germany, and more rarely London. His purpose was to assemble examples from various malolica workshops in Italy as well as signed, dated, or otherwise marked pieces to demonstrate the chronological development of artistic pottety. (7)

In 1860 Fortnum reported on the discovery in the previous year of glazed earthenware dishes known as bacini, which were embedded in the walls of several churches in Pisa One vessel showed Persian influences, and Fortnum explored the links between Italian and Persian wares. By 1862 he had several examples of Iznik and Persian luster ceramics, and his collection of Spanish lusterware included dishes and plates with European coats of anns as well as Islamic motifs. Among the Iznik wares from westem Turkey in his collection was the plate shown in Plate XE with a European coat of arms, perhaps that of the Spingarolli de Dessa family of Dalmafia (now Croatia). It was a region much under Venetian influence and maintained close commercial links with the Ottoman Empire as well.