Chantrey, Westmacott and Casts After the Antique

The collection of casts from the studio of Sir Francis Chantrey entered the newly built University Galleries (now the Ashmolean Museum) in Oxford in the 1840s. This paper describes the circumstances of their arrival, the method of display adopted, and the manner in which they were gradually driven from the main galleries into the basement in response to pressure from other parts of the collection, most notably the plaster casts after the Antique (some of which had also come from Chantrey) which were so avidly accumulated in the late nineteenth century. Finally, it describes the circumstances in which the casts were eventually, in large part, destroyed.

Antique · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Plaster Casts · Studio · Visual arts · Historical Architecture and Urbanism · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Medicine · Scottish History and National Identity

• Casts and cast-offs

  Open Access•Mary Beard•Proceedings of the Cambridge…•1994

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