by Dana Rail
Previous posts in the “Oxford Spring” series:
[A quick series housekeeping note: Mr Rail and I are packing so much into this Oxford Spring that we are finding little time (or energy!) to post on a daily basis. Ergo, we are keeping notes and will continue to post (looking backward, as it were) after we get back to the States in the last half of May. In the meantime, we’ll post these sniplets as we can.]
The Ashmolean, taken from in front of the Randolph Hotel. Photo by Dana Rail
Yesterday was our first go at the Ashmolean Museum in Beaumont Street, founded 1683. It’s the first public and “purpose built” museum in the UK and houses a massive collection of world art and archeology—hence my mention of a “first go”. There is no way to consume more than a slice of this tasty gargantuan pie in one sitting.
John Everett Millais’ portrait of John Ruskin, part of the Ashmolean PRB collection. (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Mr Rail followed the audio “Highlights” tour offered by the Museum, but I headed straight for the A’s extensive European oil painting collection, which includes a room devoted to my beloved Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The PRB was centered for some years in Oxford, thanks to the influence and encouragement of art historian and critic, John Ruskin, and the financial patronage of wealthy townsmen like Thomas Combe, head of the Oxford University Press.
I’ll be writing more about the PRB later, and will post more photos from the Ashmolean’s collection, but I want to focus in this quick post on one early Renaissance painting, probably the prize of the Ashmolean’s oil painting collection, Paulo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest.
Paulo Uccello, The Hunt in the Forest. Ashmoleaitn Museum.
Completed in the 1470s, there is something strangely modern and disturbing about this mesmerizing painting, and it can take a few minutes of study to put your finger on it: it’s the invisible, but very real, vanishing point at the heart of the painting, presumably representing the poor invisible fox or stag being hunted—a vanishing point on which all the hunters, human and canine, are bending their sights and wills. If memory serves, the painters of this period had only recently discovered the principles of perspective, including the vanishing point, and in this masterful work Uccello, a mathematician as well as painter, obsessed with such studies, puts it to unnerving use.
For Mr Rail and me both, it was the highlight of our visit.
But now here’s an oddity for you, a bit of (equally unnerving, perhaps) synchronicity.
CUE THE “TWILIGHT ZONE” MUSIC
As we’ve been doing the last week, after finishing up our day’s adventures in the Wonderland of Oxford, we returned (exhausted but happy) to our flat for a quick meal (falafel wraps from the Covered Market) and sat down to watch an episode of INSPECTOR LEWIS on ITVX. (We’ve made our way completely through MORSE and ENDEAVOUR, and are just now catching up on LEWIS.)
Well, the next ep up was S3, E3, at least as ITVX lists it: “The Point of Vanishing”.
And wouldn’t you know it, the episode centrally features (as a sort of vanishing point clue in itself, albeit perhaps more thematic than copperly) Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest.
A couple of cool scenes in the ep actually take place in the Ash, with a curator sort of “explaining” the painting. Alas, I couldn’t find a snippet of that, but here’s an episode trailer that alludes to it:
https://m.imdb.com/video/embed/vi1294056473/?vPage=1
Mr Rail and I are still shaking our heads.
