Matthew Winterbottom

The Ashmolean Museum catalogue Italian Maiolica and Europe (2017) included a range of works from Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, England, and Mexico, as well as Italy, to illustrate the rich history of European tin-glazed pottery. Since then, the Ashmolean has expanded its holdings of tin-glazed and related earthenwares to consolidate its position as one of the world’s most important and wide-ranging collections. Among the acquisitions described here is the only known piece of Italian maiolica made for a Tudor Englishman, a plate made for Humphrey Dethick, who caused a nationwide stir in 1602 by an apparent attempt to assassinate King James VI of Scotland. The bequest from Sidney Knafel of New York has transformed the Museum’s holdings of French faience; while important 16th-century maiolica comes from the collection of the late Airlie Holden-Hindley. Among the lustrewares included are fin-de-siècle pieces by Clément Massier and work by some of the world’s supreme contemporary masters of the technique.

The Wellby Bequest, received by the Ashmolean Museum in 2013, consists of some 500 precious and exotic objects, mainly from Continental Europe, from the late medieval to the rococo, and is the most remarkable accession of this kind of material to any museum in the UK since the bequest of Ferdinand de Rothschild to the British Museum in 1898 (the Waddesdon Bequest). The collection was assembled by three generations of the Wellby family with an intention that it should reflect the great princely treasure chambers (Kunstkammer) preserved in Dresden, Vienna, Innsbruck, and elsewhere. Many of these objects have never been previously published. This beautiful and accessible book introduces over sixty of the prime pieces from this astonishing addition to the Ashmolean, presenting material of the type incomparably superior to anything in other UK museums outside London. Both authors are specialists in European decorative arts of the Renaissance and later periods.