The present Ashmolean was created in 1908 by combining two ancient Oxford institutions: the University Art Collection of paintings and the original Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. There are many fine things among the paintings. Works by Batoni, Reynolds and Van Dyck, a major group of drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo, important group of watercolours by J. M. W. Turner, paintings, bronzes prints and drawings and sketches by Rubens, paintings by Canaletto and Guardi and drawings by Claude Lorrain, Leonardo, Pre-Raphaelite paintings and many other works of importance and charm by artists from the fourteenth until the nineteenth centuries. The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology exhibits, Islamic, Japanese and Chinese materials, oriental and ancient artefacts. It is this which accounts for the wealth and variety of the present collections. As a result of the merging of the two very different institutions, the present Ashmolean museum contains both art and artefacts from across a wide range of cultures: early stringed musical instruments, objects from Minoan Crete, Worcester porcelain, Chinese Shang bronzes, Japanese ceramics, European Paintings and drawings and many other specialist collections.
Museum: Ashmolean MuseumCity: Oxford
Country: United Kingdom
Address: Beaumont Street
Website: http://www.ashmolean.org