A selection of ceramics through the ages (5 second delay) Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology The Collections:
PotWeb: Ceramics online
@ the Ashmolean Museum
Early Europe & Near East
Classical to Medieval
Europe from 1500
Oriental & Islamic
Prospectus -- Ceramics in the Ashmolean
Ceramics are ubiquitous among the civilisations of the past. For ten thousand years, ceramics have combined practical and artistic expression.

Many of the ceramic collections at the Ashmolean, spread across three departments in the Museum, are among the finest of their type in the world.



Europe from 1500
  Italian Maiolica
    This outstanding collection of the art of the Renaissance potter, assembled by the Victorian scholar C.D.E. Fortnum, is one of the most representative in the world
  English Delftware
Maiolica     The Warren collection in the Museum contains particularly fine 18th-century work. It is supplemented by 17th-century archaeological finds from Oxford
Staffordshire Salt-glaze
  The highlight of the collection of Staffordshire pottery of the 17th and 18th centuries is the salt-glazed stoneware from the collection of Sir Arthur Church
Chelsea Porcelain
  The Museum also benefits from the loan of what must be the finest private collection of Chelsea porcelain
Staffordshire
Salt-glaze
French and German Porcelain
    The European porcelain collection includes fine examples of Meissen as well as other German factories and early French soft-paste porcelain

Worcester
Porcelain
  Worcester Porcelain
    The Marshall collection of First Period polychrome Worcester porcelain is one of the most representative to be found anywhere.
  Studio Pottery
    The collection of British 20th-century Studio Pottery began with two recent bequests, and already contains fine examples of the work of Dame Lucie Rie, Alan Caiger-Smith and Michael Cardew

Oriental and Islamic
Chinese
Chinese
    The Chinese collection is particularly strong in the Greenwares and other ceramics of the 3rd - 12th centuries AD. It also includes an extensive collection of later porcelain
Indian
    These relatively small collections range in date from Indus Valley wares (c. 2000 BC) to late 19th-century Indian Art School pottery
Islamic
Islamic
    The collection offers a concise but comprehensive overview of Islamic pottery from the 9th - 18th centuries AD. Highlights include 17th- and 18th-century Persian Blue-and-White wares
Japanese
Japanese
    The Museum has one of the finest collections of Japanese export porcelain, and one of only two collections of pre-export porcelain from the first half of the 17th century, together with stonewares made for the domestic market from the 16th century onwards


Greek

Classical to Medieval
Greek
    A comprehensive collection from Neolithic to Hellenistic. the Classical period is represented by a wide range of vessels for wine drinking, decorated with scenes of religious, sporting and everyday life

Roman
  Roman
    Roman ceramics include Mediterranean fineware, Arretine and North African Slipware The collection is especially strong in local pottery from an important Roman industry centred on Oxford itself
  Byzantine

Medieval Europe
    The Byzantine section includes a substantial collection of pilgrim flasks, dating from the 4th-7th centuries AD, and ceramics from the cargo of a ship wrecked in the 12th century off the island of Skopelos
  Medieval English
    Collections include a splendid range of Anglo-Saxon burial urns from East Anglia and the Upper Thames Valley of the 5th - 7th centuries AD, and vessels from the most accomplished medieval ceramic industry of England, the Brill/Boarstall potteries in Buckinghamshire. These date from the 13th - 16th century AD

Early Europe and Near East
Egypt and Nubia
Near East
    A comprehensive array from some of the earliest pottery-making cultures, which include the original type series from which the chronology of prehistoric Egypt was established
Near East
    This is the most representative collection in the UK outside the British Museum of pottery from ancient Palestine to Mesopotamia, dating from c. 6000 BC to c. 4500 BC
Prehistoric Europe
Prehistoric Europe
    Includes the first pots in the Balkans (c. 8000 BC) to an important collection of British funerary vessels of the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age date up to the beginning of the Roman period


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last updated: jcm/28-mar-2003