Ashmolean Museum: Features - Exhibitions

Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology
Previous Exhibitions (1998)

	Current Exhibitions	Future Exhibitions	Previous Exhibitions: 1995; 1996; 1997; 1999; 2000; 2001; 2002; 2003; 2004; 2005; 2006

Antiquities	Eastern Art	Heberden Coin Room	Western Art

The Department of Antiquities
Eldon Gallery: 18th December 1998 - 3rd January 1999	Piet de Jong's Cartoons
'A sideswipe at archaeology in Greece in the 1920's and 30's.' An exhibition of caricatures by the Dutch architect and draughtsman Piet de Jong (1887-1967) who worked with Arthur Evans and other excavators in Crete and mainland Greece during the 1920's and 1930's.
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The Department of Eastern Art
Eric North Room: 26th September - 30th November	Japanese Screens
This exhibition comprised a selection of beautifully decorated Japanese folding screens from the Ashmolean's own collection and also from that of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Artists represented included Kano Toun Masanobu and Watanabe Shiko. The exhibition coincided with the publication of a fully illustrated book, The Art of the Japanese Folding Screen, by Dr. Oliver Impey, Curator of the Japanese Collections in the Ashmolean Museum.
Eric North Room: 4th December 1997 - 1st February 1998	Ceramics and Tilework from Islamic Syria
This exhibition showed a range of ceramics from Syria in the medieval and Ottoman periods. They included bold 12th to 14th-century arabesque designs in underglaze pigments; 15th-century blue and white designs based on imported Chinese styles; and purple, green and blue floral designs derived from contemporary Iznik which were used to decorate both objects and tiles in 16th to 17th-century Damascus. The objects were drawn from the Department's reserve collection.
Eric North Room: 4th February - 29th March 1998	Paintings from Mughal India
The exhibition was drawn mainly from the Museum's collection of paintings of the Mughal, Deccani, Rajput and Company schools, dating from the late sixteenth to nineteenth century. Their subjects included portraits of rulers and ladies, studies of birds and holy men, and examples of the popular genre of ragwnala or the illustration of musical modes.
Eric North Room: 1st April - 31st May 1998	One Hundred Phases of the Moon
A selection of Japanese Woodblock Prints from "One Hundred Phases of the Moon" by Taiso Yoshitoshi (1839-1892).
Eric North Room: June 1998	Chinese Calligraphy
Chinese writing as we know it today originated in pictographs incised on ceramics of the Neolithic period, and aesthetic experimentation in brush and ink only began in the 3rd century AD. At that stage, the fluid calligraphic style which was to become China's most refined form of artistic expression developed in the south, while in the north calligraphy retained the rather square forms of characters in ancient inscriptions on bronze or stone. One of these archaic styles, known as lishu, was developed by scribes in the last few centuries BC and has been adopted by several modern calligraphers and was included in this exhibition.
Eric North Room: July 1998	Oxyrhynchus: A City and Its Texts
Oxyrhynchus, now called Behnasa, is 125 miles south of Cairo. The excavations that took place here at the turn of the century were the source of the Egyptian Exploration Society's Papyrus Collection housed in the Ashmolean Museum. This exhibition will include photographs of the excavations and modern views of the site together with a wide range of manuscript material.
Eric North Room: August 1998	Shoji Hamada: Master Potter
This was a loan exhibition of the work of this influential Japanese artist (1894-1978) presented in association with Asia House. The Catalogue was edited by Tim Wilcox. Universally recognised as one of this century's greatest masters of the craft, he worked with Bernard Leach in establishing the pottery of St. Ives in the 1920s. On his return to Japan during the next 50 years he produced an enormous output of pottery from his rural workshop in Mashiko.
Eric North Room: 3rd September to 1st November 1998	Japanese Paintings of the Nanga School
The Nanga, or Southern School of Japanese painters, were active in the early eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century; even in the twentieth, there were a few adherents of the style. The style is based on that of the 'Southern School' of Chinese scholar-painters and was an active revival, attempting to break away from the traditional Kano School of Japanese painting, which itself was based on the 'Northern School' of Chinese painting. Although this was a conscious decision on the part of the Japanese, there was some confusion over exactly what was Southern' and what was Northern', with the result that Japanese Nanga painting is very variable in style. Most of the paintings in this exhibition were purchased in 1966 from the collection of the late Jack Hillier, a much respected authority on later Japanese painting, to mark the retirement, as Keeper, of Peter Swann.
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Heberden Coin Room
No Information
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The Department of Western Art
McAlpine Gallery: 30th September 1997 - 18th January 1998 and Eldon Gallery: 30th September - 8th December	Portrait Prints from the Hope Collection
The print collection of the Revd F.W. Hope (1797-1862) has been housed in the Ashmolean for more than seventy years and continues to grow by purchase and bequest. It now contains nearly 100,000 images, and constitutes an important resource for students of British, European, and American history. During the last two years, through the generosity of the Sackler Foundation, details of the greater part of the Collection have been entered onto a database, and it is hoped that this improved access will encourage greater use. The exhibition included some seventy prints, ranging in date from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and displaying a wide variety of techniques. Besides giving some idea of the scope of the collection, this selection was primarily designed to show how prints, the only multiple images in a pre-photographic age, could be valuable to the historian, both in their own right and as an index of contemporary perceptions.
Eldon Gallery: 9th December 1997 - 15th February 1998	Samuel Palmer (1805-1881)
The collection of works by Samuel Palmer in the Ashmolean Museum is the most important in the world. It is especially rich in the early paintings and drawings from his Shoreham period, notably the haunting self-portrait and the unique group of six sepia drawings of 1825, which represent the "visionary landscape" at its most profound. This display coincided with the publication of a new colour handbook to the collection and included representative examples of his later work, as well as some of the etchings, in which he sought to recapture the intensity of his early years.
McAlpine Gallery: 27th January 1998 - 12th April 1998	Hawkesmoor and the Re-planning of Oxford
The attempts by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor to remodel the centre of Oxford in the 1730s were among the most imaginative schemes for town planning in the eighteenth century. Many of his ideas were not put into practice, but the area around the Radcliffe Camera, originally planned as a grandiose extension to the Bodleian Library, was completed by James Gibbs in 1748. This exhibition included architectural drawings, contemporary views and the newly restored model of the Radcliffe Camera, to evoke the plans to replace the mediaeval city centre with a Baroque town plan.
Eldon Gallery: 17th February 1998 - 19th April 1998	Drawings from the Grete Ring Bequest
Grete Ring's bequest in 1954 is celebrated for the distinguished representation of nineteenth-century German drawings, which include sheets by such artists as Caspar David Friedrich, Phillip Otto Runge, and many of the Nazarene artists who studied in Rome. However, her collection also included a strong group of French drawings, with notable pencil studies by Delacroix and Ingres, Cézanne and Degas. This was the first time that both parts of the collection were exhibited together.
McAlpine Gallery: 21st April - 21st June 1998	L.N. Cottingham (1787-1847): Architect of the Gothic Revival
Until now there has been no proper assessment of Cottingham, who paved the way for the Gothic Revival --- in advance of his better known contemporaries Pugin and Ruskin -- and who was considered by his contemporaries to be the leading Medievalist architect of the day. He set new standards of informal and sensitive restoration practice evidenced by his restoration work at Rochester and Hereford Cathedrals and Magdalen College Chapel (1829-35).
Eldon Gallery: 21st April - 21st June 1998	Illustrators of the 1860s: The Forrest Reid Collection of Victorian Book Illustration
Forrest Reid (1875-1947) -- Novelist, Critic, Autobiographer and Collector -- lived throughout his life in suburban Belfast. This was the first public exhibition of Reid's collection of Victorian book and periodical illustrations, on which he largely based his book Illustrators of the Sixties (1928) and which he donated to the Ashmolean in 1946.
McAlpine Gallery and Eldon Gallery: 30th June - 13th September 1998	Drawings by Claude Lorrain
An exhibition of 100 or so drawings by Claude Lorrain (1600-82) from the collections in the British Museum and the Ashmolean, including pages from his Liber Veritatis (in which he made drawings as a record of his paintings), preparatory drawings and studies from nature. The exhibition was accompanied by a substantial catalogue by Dr Jon Whiteley, Senior Assistant Keeper in the Department of Western Art.
McAlpine Gallery: 22nd September - 13 December 1998	Malchair and the Oxford School
John Baptist Malchair (1731-1812) was born in Cologne and settled in Oxford in 1765. A watercolour painter and engraver, he became a fashionable drawing master and music teacher in the City. He made a large number of drawings of Oxford and the colleges, several of which provided the source for `Almanack' illustrations in the later 19th century.
Eldon Gallery: 15th September - 13 December 1998	Anne Desmet
Anne Desmet is one of the most talented and original exponents in Britain today of the difficult art of wood engraving. Her work was last seen at the Ashmolean in 1995 when she exhibited in the Society of Wood Engraver 75th Anniversary Exhibition `Wood Engraving Here and Now'.
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	Current Exhibitions	Future Exhibitions	Previous Exhibitions: 1995; 1996; 1997; 1999; 2000; 2001; 2002; 2003; 2004; 2005; 2006

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