In the foreword to last year's report, I outlined my vision for the future of the Ashmolean which envisaged building on the success of the Museum as a centre for teaching and research in the University, while at the same time developing more effective public services. We have begun this work. The Museum has been open again on summer evenings. The Education Department, which has very modest resources, has welcomed more schoolchildren and the provision of new Teachers' packs has enabled them to use the Museum to greater effect. We have staged the most successful exhibition in the Museum's history in terms of visitors, `Turner's Oxford': the support of the Oxford Mail, for which we are immensely grateful, played a large part in its popular success. The Khoan and Michael Sullivan Gallery of Chinese Painting has been completed and opened on 11 October. The Early Twentieth-century Gallery has been completed and its contents planned: only the delay on the Sackler Library is holding it up. We hope to open in the spring. We have taken the opportunity of the Chinese Painting Gallery opening to renovate the displays in the old Chinese Galleries, improving the lighting, renewing the fabrics and building a large new display case for ceramics. The display of Renaissance art in the Fox-Strangways Gallery re-opened on 5 October: the fabric has been replaced, the lighting improved and labelling renewed. Work to improve the display, lighting and provision of information in the Egyptian and Prehistoric European collections is under way. Our prime concern is always to improve the quality of the experience of a visit to the Ashmolean.
There is still much to do, and planning the future has occupied a great deal of time this year. We have commissioned Rick Mather Architects to undertake a Master Plan of the building and there has been a series of meetings with staff to help create a blueprint for the future, a blueprint in which the building is effectively used to present its remarkable collections in the best possible way to its visitors.
This year has witnessed a great debate about the future of the non-national museums. In a speech at the Royal Academy Annual Dinner in June, Lord Rothschild drew attention to the plight of the municipal and university museums, which are so grotesquely underfunded compared with the great national museums. As someone who has moved from a senior position in a national museum to become Director of a University Museum, I can testify to the shocking disparity in resources. In certain respects the collections of the Ashmolean are as important or even more important than those of the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and yet we have only a tiny fraction of the financial and staff resources available to the London museums. In the case of the Ashmolean, it is the funds to improve display and educational provision, and the staff to carry out those improvements, which are lacking. We can only hope that the Government, which has now been alerted to this major problem, will be willing to act.
It was particularly cruel in that the painting—along with other outstanding twentieth-century paintings and drawings—was presented to the Ashmolean by Richard and Sophie Walzer, who had sought refuge from Hitler's Germany in Oxford. With this gift they wished to record their gratitude to this country and to Oxford in particular.
Prior to the theft the Ashmolean had received a high security rating from the National Advisor on Museum Security. However, following the loss of the Cézanne, a new security survey of the building was undertaken and extensive improvements in the Museum's security have been made. These were extremely costly and despite generous support from the University it has been necessary to use funds which had been earmarked for other purposes.
Three valued members of the Department of Eastern Art have retired: David Armitage who served the Museum for thirty years as Conservator of Eastern Art, Warwick Freeman, the member of the Workshop team with responsibility for Eastern Art displays for sixteen years, and Wendy Maine who was departmental draughtsman for twenty-three years.
The Early Twentieth-century Gallery, part of the larger Sackler Library development, is, however, running significantly behind schedule. It is hoped to open this marvellous new gallery, in which our rich collection of 20th-century paintings, sculpture and drawings can be displayed, in the spring of 2001. The Fox-Strangways Gallery, the gallery devoted to Renaissance art, has been renovated thanks to Daniel Katz, who two years ago generously helped us to renovate the Weldon Gallery. We are enormously grateful to Mr Katz, a long-term supporter of the Ashmolean.
A refurbishment of the Egyptian Dynastic collections has begun in the Sackler Gallery of Egyptian Antiquities, generously funded by the Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation. This is a major operation involving thousands of objects, some delicate and often very small, that will take about eighteen months. Every step has been taken to minimize problems of access to those parts of the Egyptian displays not directly affected, so that they may still be accessible for visitors and school parties. This is the first major new installation since the present Dynastic displays were completed in 1963.
In the first-floor Antiquities galleries, a rolling programme of gallery redecoration and display refurbishment has reached the John Evans Gallery (European Prehistory), following completion of the new von Bothmer Gallery for the reserve Greek collection, and renovation of the Beazley Gallery displays in the last three years. Work on the John Evans Gallery, now in progress, has been made possible by a gift for this purpose originally made in 1983. Following their contribution to the refurbishment of the Arthur Evans (Minoan) Gallery, the Amey Roadstone Corporation (as it then was) made a donation to be used at an appropriate time in the Prehistoric European Gallery adjacent to it. Some of the local objects on exhibition there are from gravel pits worked by the Corporation at one time or another in the last century. After redecoration of the whole Gallery, the displays, in order to minimize inconvenience to the general public, will be refurbished quadrant by quadrant, starting with the Iron Age in the southwestern corner. `The Arts of Byzantium' are now appropriately housed for the first time in small, well lit cases at the foot of the recently redecorated back staircase. These new displays reveal this as a distinctive and eye-catching part of the collections.
The delay in the completion of the Sackler Library (and, consequently, the Early Twentieth-Century Gallery) has had other important consequences for the Ashmolean. The areas occupied by the Ashmolean Library and the libraries of Western Art and Eastern Art, which have been allocated to the Museum by the University's Building Committee, will not be vacated in full before summer 2001. Plans have been drawn up for the conversion of the first into temporary exhibition galleries, the second into a Prints and Drawings Gallery and (on the top floor) a paper conservation studio, and the last into a seminar room. Funds permitting, this work will be undertaken in the autumn of 2001 and 2002.
Substantial progress has been made on the Ashmolean Humanities Project. Detailed plans for a joint development between the Ashmolean and the Faculty of Literae Humaniores (Classics) have been drawn up by the architects Evans and Shalev, who were chosen after a public competition. These plans have attracted partial funding and the remaining funding is currently being sought. They have been submitted for planning permission. A Master Plan which will re-assess the current disposition of the collections and the relationship between public and private space in the building is being prepared by the architect Rick Mather. It should be completed by the end of 2000 and will be the subject of discussions throughout the Museum early in the following year.
The Museum's world-renowned collection of Anglo-Saxon jewellery received an outstanding addition this year when the seventh-century Holderness Cross was acquired with the generous support of the NACF and the help of the London dealer Sam Fogg, who had bought it at auction. It was originally found in the mud of a farm at Burton Pidsea on the Holderness peninsula in East Yorkshire thirty years ago, but it was not recognized for what it was until 1998. It passed through the Treasure Trove procedure in April 1999 and was then sent by the owner to a London auction house. The cross is made of gold inlaid with garnets, many now lost, with a suspension-loop with filigree ornament at the top to secure it to a necklace. Of the four known crosses of this type, that from Stanton near Ixworth in Suffolk, has been in the Ashmolean for many years as part of the John Evans collection. Another is in the British Museum and the fourth, found in the coffin of St Cuthbert, who died in 687 AD, is in the Treasury of Durham Cathedral. Antiquities turn up in unlikely places: a copper alloy axe-head, dated about 2000--1800 BC, which has been presented to the Museum by Laszlo Grof in memory of his father Sandor Grof of Sarvar in Hungary, was given to him in Transylvania years ago as the handle of a walking stick.
An outstanding purchase was the tenth-century Chinese, gilt and polychrome wooden Bodhisattva, which was acquired with the aid of the Nation Art Collections Fund, S. Wheatland Fisher, the Friends of the Ashmolean, an anonymous benefactor and the Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation. The generosity of an anonymous benefactor enabled the Museum to continue to purchase objects from India, Tibet and South-East Asia, and yet another anonymous benefactor presented the Ashmolean with a magnificent Kakiemon vase dating from c.1670. Two objects were presented to the Museum to honour members of the Department of Eastern Art: a seventeenth-century Arita Jug in recognition of the work of David Armitage, who retired as Conservator of Eastern Art after thirty years' service, and a pair of Shibayama vases in gold lacquer in honour of Dr Oliver Impey, by the Khalili Family Collection of Japanese Art.
Major grants from the Re: Source/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, the National Art Collections Fund, the Friends of the Ashmolean and the Carl and Eileen Suback Family Foundation have enabled the Museum to acquire an outstanding collection of 816 late Byzantine coins (c.1204- -1453).
These have by no means been the only acquisitions this year. Among the others are a Roman lamp in the shape of a centurion's boot, a bust of Marie de Médicis, a silver monteith and a painting by Tom Phillips. All the Museum's acquisitions are listed in detail in the Departmental Reports which follow.
It should be recorded that throughout the year the National Art Collections Fund has continued to be an outstandingly generous supporter of the Ashmolean.
The Heberden Coin Room has also received a major gift from the anonymous charitable trust which funded the acquisition of the R.C. Senior collection of Indo-Scythian and Indo-Parthian coins. This second gift will fund the first year of the appointment of an Assistant Keeper to curate the new acquisitions and take charge of the non-Islamic South and Central Asian collections. This appointment will bring the Coin Room back to full strength, the University having undertaken to resume financial responsibility for the post from 2002.
Mrs May Blakeman was renowned for the care and detail she brought to the role of Membership Secretary of the Friends, which she undertook from 1975 until 1987, when failing eye-sight caused her retirement. She and her husband were also among the founders of the Museum's small but growing collection of British studio pottery.
The entire world of Art History mourns the loss of Professor Francis Haskell, one of the most influential art historians of our time. As Professor of the History of Art at Oxford, he was a Visitor of the Ashmolean from 1967 until 1995, and was unequalled in his care and affection for the Museum. The portrait of Giacomo Doria by Titian, who was Francis's favourite painter, has been purchased in his memory.