Textiles Gallery - The Ashmolean Museum

Silk embroidery on
linen, Egypt,
13th-14th century AD
Painted shroud for a
boy named
Nespawtytawy, Egypt,
1st-2nd century AD
O
This is about to change with the
The
NE OF THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM’S bestkept
secrets is its large collection of textiles. Looking
at what is currently on display – five tapestries, an
embroidered wall-hanging, a late medieval cloth of
gold, and some small pieces in the Antiquities and
Western Art galleries – who would guess that the
overall number of textiles comes to over 4,000 pieces?
Museum’s proposed redevelopment,
within which a major new textile gallery
is planned. For the first time this will
provide space to display our important
collections. With approximately 3,500
pieces, the Department of Eastern Art
has the largest holdings. Just over 2,200
of these textiles came to the Museum in
the 1940s as a donation from Professor
P.E. Newberry, in his time a prominent
Egyptologist. He and his wife also had a
keen interest in textile history, and
while living in Egypt they assembled a
unique study collection of more than
1,200 Indian medieval trade textiles and
over 1,000 early Islamic embroideries.
The Newberry collection is by far the
largest of its kind in any public museum
worldwide.
Department also has visually
stunning garments from 19th-century
Central Asia, collected by the English
explorer Robert Shaw in 1868/69
during an expedition to Kashgar and
Yarkand, at a time when the region was
independent from China. It is one of
the few 19th-century Central Asian
collections with a certain provenance
and date, and it is exceptionally well
documented. Additional material comes
from all parts of Asia and the Islamic
world, from Ottoman Greece to Japan.
India, China, and Islam are well
represented with well over 600 items,
many of them large garments or
hangings.
The Antiquities Department holds
some 800 pieces, including fragments
retrieved from archaeological sites, and