The works in this exhibition have been carefully chosen from a much larger collection of nineteenth-century European drawings, which has been brought together somewhat haphazardly in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford over a period of nearly one hundred and fifty years. There are too many obvious gaps to allow us to claim that it represents a history of nineteenth-century drawing, but it usefully indicates what was once available to our predecessors and what was valued by them when forming the collection. The prestige that the twentieth century attached to the French Romantics, the Impressionists, the Russian artists of the “World of Art” movement, and the German Nazarenes is evident in many of the drawings in this exhibition. Ideally, a survey of nineteenth-century drawings would also have included more works by Italian artists, one or two Spanish drawings, some works by pupils of David, a few later German drawings, and a group of drawings by Scandinavians; but these areas were out of fashion for a large part of the last century and, as a result, they have not yet been acquired to any significant extent by museums in the UK. On the other hand, we have been able to include a good drawing by Bouguereau, an artist once much reviled by art historians, to remind ourselves that the taste of our predecessors had its limitations when it came to judging the achievements of so-called academic artists.
The collection of nineteenth-century drawings in the Ashmolean began in the life-time of many of the artists who made them. By the 1860s, the University Museum was already famous for the wealth of drawings by Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Dürer, Claude and others, which have long constituted one of the University’s greatest treasures. When John Ruskin gave the museum collections of drawings and watercolors by Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites in 1861 and 1875 along with a large number by himself, he did so in the belief that the best of contemporary art could hold its own—or surpass—the most renowned drawings by the artists of the past. Ruskin’s gifts have been followed over the years by many others. As a result, the work of British artists from Wilkie to the Pre-Raphaelites is generously represented in this exhibition.
The belief in the value of collecting contemporary art translated in due course into a taste for contemporary French art. In particular, it led to a widespread enthusiasm for the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, which further resulted in a series of gifts and bequests to the Ashmolean and to many other museums in Europe and the United States. The drawings by Millet, Degas, Cézanne, Corot, Morisot, Rodin, and Renoir in the exhibition were all donated by collectors with a special interest in recent and contemporary French art. Some of these were brought to Oxford by refugees from continental Europe who settled in England during the first half of the century. Dr Grete Ring—source of some of the finest French nineteenth-century drawings—is chiefly famous for her bequest of drawings by Nazarene artists; Mrs. Richard Walzer bequeathed a number of outstanding works by the Impressionists that her father, Bruno Cassirer, had taken out of Germany in the 1930s; and the great strength of the Ashmolean collection of Russian drawings from the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries derives from the bequest of Mikhail Vasil’evich Braikevitch, a Russian collector who fled from Russia in the years after the Revolution.
Gifts and bequests have always been the mainstay of the collection (two of the finest water colors in this exhibition are recent gifts), but these have been complemented by a policy of purchases. In this respect, the greatest contribution was made by Sir Karl Parker. As Keeper of the Department of Western Art from 1934-62, he bought hundreds of drawings by famous artists as well as many by those who were then little known, including several in the present exhibition. None of us can ever escape from the taste of our times entirely—if at all. This exhibition shows that great things can be achieved within the constraints of fashion by a curator or collector driven by conviction and passion. It celebrates a view of the nineteenth century, which will seem increasingly selective as time goes by, but it is a selection based upon a profound belief in the over-riding importance of quality. This belief has chiefly dictated our choice of drawings for the present exhibition.
Jon Whiteley
Department of Western Art
Ashmolean Museum