Jon Whiteley – författare

The Ashmolean's collection of European stringed instruments is not large but it is very famous. Several of the instruments in the Ashmolean are among the rarest and most beautiful of their kind and most are, in some way, exceptional. The collection was founded on a group of instruments which was given to the museum by the firm of W.E. Hill & Sons in 1939 and has since been increased by two bequests and by an important group of bows and instruments given by Albert Cooper in 1999. The firm of W.E. Hill & Sons was founded in 1880 and by the early 20th century the firm had achieved an unrivalled reputation in making, restoring, and selling stringed instruments.In the course of handling and repairing instruments, the Hills became increasingly aware of the damage that was being inflicted on early viols and violins by constant playing and repeated restoration. This concern gave rise to the idea of donating a select group of rare instruments to a museum where they would be preserved from further harm, and the first instruments were handed over in 1939. The present handbook discusses and illustrates every stringed instrument in the collection and is chiefly intended for the many visitors to the Hill Collection and for the wider public who might wish for more information about the instruments and some background history.

The collection of drawings in the Ashmolean is one of the greatest treasures of the University of Oxford. It began spectacularly in 1843 when a group of drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo that had previously belonged to the portrait painter, Sir Thomas Lawrence, was bought by subscription. Lawrence's collection was one of the greatest collections of Old Master drawings ever assembled and its dispersal was much regretted. The Raphaels and Michelangelos, however, were the jewels in its crown. Following their arrival in Oxford, their fame attracted a number of gifts and bequests of drawings and watercolours by Dürer, Claude Lorraine, Brueghel, J. M. W Turner, Henry Moore and many others. This is a story not only of Old Masters but of benefactors - Francis Douce, Chambers Hall, John Ruskin and their successors - whose different tastes account for the variety of the drawings in the modern Print Room. It is a story also of the curators who bought them. In particular, it is the story of Sir Karl Parker who arrived at the museum in 1934 and left a collection when he retired in 1962 that comprehensively covered the history of the art of drawing in Europe from its origins to the present day. The exhibition, Master Drawings: Michelangelo to Moore, celebrates this history. It includes many of the finest drawings in Oxford, representing the work of many different artists: Raphael and Michelangelo; Dürer and the artists of the Northern Renaissance; Guercino and Rubens; Boucher and Tiepolo; German Romantics; J. M. W. Turner; Degas and Pissarro; the artists of the Ballets Russes; British twentieth-century artists from Gwen John to Hockney; and much else.