A N N U A L R E P O R T - The Ashmolean Museum

8 / Highlights of the Annual Report 2004–05
Staff
Robert Thorpe took up the post of Deputy Director (Administration) on 16 th
May. He read History at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and had worked at
Barclays Bank firstly as an undergraduate trainee and latterly as a Senior Risk
Manager. Dr Oliver Watson became Keeper of Eastern Art, succeeding
Professor James Allan, who is now Director of the Ashmolean Inter-Faith
Exhibition Service. Oliver is an extremely distinguished Islamicist who had
worked at the V&A, and had most recently been on secondment to Qatar
where he was helping to create a new Museum of Islamic Art in Doha.
Roger Hobby took on the full-time role of Special Projects Officer on the
Ashmolean Plan. Dr Chris Howgego was appointed Acting Keeper of the
Heberden Coin Room during Professor Nick Mayhew’s term as Deputy
Director (Collections). Penelope Betts, Capital Gifts manager and Antony
Green, Researcher and Administrator, have joined the Development team.
The Development office also recruited a database manager, Nick Butterley,
to oversee the implementation of a new database supporting the capital
campaign and revenue fundraising strategy. A second capital gifts officer is in
the process of being recruited to increase and maintain the momentum of the
campaign. Forty volunteers were recruited and trained in 2005 to cover the
Information Desk at the Portico entrance.
Exhibitions
In 2006 we will be scaling back our exhibition programme because of the
building works, but this year has seen an outstanding group of exhibitions:
‘Jingdezhen Porcelain’ and ‘Fu Baoshi’; ‘The Pissarro Family At Home’, to
celebrate our acquisition of the remainder of the family’s great archive of
paintings, prints, drawings and letters; the remarkable career of Pu Quan, a
member of the Imperial family who worked successfully in the People’s
Republic as a landscape artist; the delicate landscapes of the “unknown
PreRaphaelite”, Alfred William Hunt, which was a collaboration with the
Yale Center for British Art ; ‘The Lost Emperor’, which portrayed a coin
hoard including a coin featuring a hitherto unknown Roman Emperor
Domitianus ; contemporary portraits by Qu Lei Lei ; and, to round off a
remarkable year, the exhibition of a thousand years of botanical art based on
the collection of Shirley Sherwood, called ‘A New Flowering’. We are
especially grateful to Shirley Sherwood for her role in organizing the
exhibition and writing much of the superb catalogue, which has been the
undisputed bestseller of the year.
Acquisitions
I am especially pleased that this year the new Keeper of Antiquities, Dr Susan
Walker, acquired an important classical sculpture, the Roman marble bust of
a priest from the Eastern Mediterranean, which immediately looked at home
in the Randolph Sculpture Gallery, alongside the Arundel marbles. Tim Wilson,
the energetic Keeper of Western Art, continued his remarkable record of
acquisitions by leading a consortium of museums to acquire the Cassel silver.
It was in recognition of his leadership that this outstanding group of 16 th -
and 17 th -century English silver was exhibited for the first time after its
purchase in the Farrer Gallery of the Ashmolean. As a specialist in the study of
Dutch 17 th -century painting, I was naturally delighted by the purchase of a
superb example of the landscape art of Aelbert Cuyp. Another highlight was
the purchase by the Coin Room of the Roman hoard, which included a coin
issued by the rebel emperor Domitianus, otherwise unknown to history.