Exploring the Ashmolean

After a weekend of glorious absense from school I'm back. I'm still working on that London entry so be patient with that, it was a very interesting two days so it's taking some time to upload the pictures and what not. I actually had to do *gasp* homework yesterday so my other choices were catching up on sleep and writing, in which I chose sleep.

Actually yesterday I ventured outside of campus for a few hours to see some more of Oxford's sites and visited the Ashmolean Museum. I gotta say that it's the most eclectic collection I have ever seen in my life. This museum isn't all art, or all natural history, or all antiques, it's a bit of everything rolled into two very large floors. There are originals and plaster casts of Greco-Roman statues of various things, red/black Athenian pottery, as well as very old armour and swords. There's also a quite interesting collection of Egyptian artifacts including a full sandstone shrine. But these things I've also seen in other places, what really got me excited was the huge collection of Anglo-Saxon artifacts from around England. They had pots and pans and jewelry and swords and armor as well as models of houses and settlements. They even had Neolithic, Bronze and Iron age artifacts!! Way cool.

I also got to see Indian, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic displays that had pottery, caligraphy examples, statues, and other various things. And one room tucked away from the rest had some really interesting Native American items, including the mantle of Powhatan (Pocahontas' dad). There were also lots of different paintings in the museum, lots of Renaissance and a few Impressionist and Post-Impressionist ones. They actually had a few sketches by Michelangelo and Da Vinci. My favorite part of the art display were the English painters, of which I know so little. There were some Turner watercolors as well as one Gainsborough and two or three Constable paintings. I especially liked Constable's "Study of Clouds". It's so simple and pretty, I very rarely see just paintings of the sky. Plus the texture of that work is indescribable, I just really really liked it. I've included a picture of it above. See, it really is just some clouds.

For now I'm going to head to dinner, today was fairly uneventful aside from the return of the nasty drizzly rain and the return of the ducklings from the pond in my history class. But I do get to see Tommy soon since he's spending his day off here tomorrow. The weather service promises that Thursday is going to be a nice sweltering 84 degrees but I don't believe it. We shall see :)