Ashmolean Museum

The antiquary Elias Ashmole left his cabinet of curiosities to the University of Oxford in 1677. The collection had been put together by the gardeners and collectors John Tradescant and his son, and it ranged across antique coins, books, engravings and natural specimens. A purpose-built home rose between 1678 and 1683, and the museum first opened on 24 May 1683, with Robert Plot, a naturalist, as its first keeper.

The institution that opened its doors was Britain's first public museum. Its present home on Beaumont Street dates from 1841 to 1845, when Charles Cockerell designed it as the University Galleries. In 1908 the Ashmolean and those University Galleries became one body, taking the name Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology that survives today.

Sir Arthur Evans, keeper from 1884, is largely the maker of the modern museum. Between 2006 and 2009 the building was expanded to designs by Rick Mather, doubling the display space and adding conservation studios, and it reopened on 7 November 2009.

Galleries kept opening in the years after. New rooms for Egypt and Nubia arrived in November 2011, and Victorian art was redisplayed in May 2016. The Chinese Picture Gallery, opened in 2000 by van Heyningen and Haward Architects, remains the only gallery in Britain devoted to Chinese paintings.

The collection spans archaeology and fine art, and its Pre-Raphaelite paintings, majolica ware and English silver rank among the best anywhere. Arthur Evans's bequest brought Greek and Minoan pottery, and the antiquities departments hold material from ancient Egypt and the Sudan.

The highlights run from drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael and by Leonardo da Vinci to paintings by Uccello, van Dyck, Rubens, Titian, Claude Lorrain, Piero di Cosimo and Holman Hunt, and from the Alfred Jewel and the Messiah Stradivarius violin to the Parian Marble and the Narmer macehead. The Daisy Linda Ward bequest of 1939 added 96 still lifes, and the Pissarro Family Archive, given in the 1950s, keeps the work of Camille Pissarro and his family in one place.

The museum's only Picasso is Blue Roofs, Paris, painted in 1901. Michael Sullivan's bequest of late 2013 brought more than 400 works of modern Chinese art, including paintings by Qi Baishi, Zhang Daqian and Wu Guanzhong, and a Taichi Arch by Ju Ming was set on the forecourt in 2013 in Sullivan's memory.

Two pictures were saved for the nation this century. Manet's Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus, painted in 1868, was bought in 2012 after a public appeal, and Turner's High Street, Oxford of 1810, his only full-size townscape in oils, was acquired in 2015.