The Magazine Antiques

London
New galleries at the British Museum
The British Museum has opened two important new permanent galleries. The Paul and Jill Ruddock Gallery of Medieval Europe presents a display of the museum's staggering collection of medieval treasures dating from 1050 to 1500, looking at both sacred and profane masterpieces as windows into the culture that created them. The Royal Gold Cup, commissioned by Jean, duc de Berry between about 1370 and 1380, and the Lewis Chessmen of about 1150 to 1200, for example, can be admired both as exquisite objects and as material documents that hint at the courtly pursuits and protocols of the sophisticated society in which they originated. Similarly, a tiled pavement from Byland Abbey in North Yorkshire speaks as much to the spiritual fervor of its makers as to their technical skills and aesthetics. The juxtaposition of Byzantine and Western religious images evidences the convergences and differences in the underlying theologies of these two societies, while a special section devoted to the Byzantine Empire highlights its importance as a hub of trade and culture.

A second important new gallery, part of a world-class center for the study of ceramics, showcases 1,752 pieces of Chinese porcelain from the Song, Ming, Yuan, and Qing dynasties, drawn from the superlative collection assembled by Sir Percival David.

The core of the David Collection began with porcelain sold off from China's Imperial City in 1927. It gained acclaim after its first public display at London's Dorchester Hotel in 1931 and in 1950, administered by the foundation named after its creator, passed into the hands of the University of London. Sadly, the foundation ran into financial difficulties in late 2007. Its long-term loan to the British Museum, facilitated through a generous donation by Sir Joseph Hotung, assures that this important collection will remain accessible to experts and amateurs alike.

British Museum, London · www.britishmuseum.org

New galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum
This year London's Victoria and Albert Museum completes its most ambitious redesign projects since it launched the new British Galleries in 2001. The climax will be the opening in November of the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, occupying ten rooms in an entire wing of the museum. Leading up to this, on September 18 portions of the new Ceramics Galleries will open. Scheduled for completion in 2010, the galleries represent the first reinstallation of the museum's enormous ceramics collection in more than a century. In addition to highlighting links between ceramic traditions around the world from ancient times on, a new emphasis has been placed on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and includes a partial reconstruction of the studio of Dame Lucie Rie. A gallery devoted to the techniques of ceramic production will allow visitors to try their hands at some of them. One gallery will rotate displays, starting with "Objects of Luxury," devoted to French eighteenth-century pieces, especially those from Sèvres.

Meanwhile, this month the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Galleries will open to display the magnificent gold, silver, micromosaics, and pietre dure boxes formerly on view at Somerset House. In March the museum opened its new Theatre and Performance Galleries. April witnessed the debut of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Gallery, where approximately fifty pieces of Buddhist sculpture from India, Sri Lanka, the Himalayas, Burma (Myanmar), Java, Thailand, China, and Japan, and dating from between 200 and 1850, elucidate the diverse spiritual and artistic interpretations of the Buddha. It is the first Buddhist sculpture gallery in the United Kingdom.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London · www.vam.ac.uk

Oxford
Pitt Rivers Museum
The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford reopened on May 1 after being closed for nearly a year for refurbishment. Those enamored of the quirky eccentric charms of this ethnographic museum built upon the 1884 bequest of eighteen thousand objects from General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers will be delighted that the 1960s display at the museum's entrance has been dismantled so that the original cases can be returned to their old places. Eight new displays have also been added and allow many previously unseen objects to be on view. As always, this eclectic array of artifacts-including a Tahitian mourner's costume collected during Captain Cook's second voyage to the Pacific Islands in 1773 and 1774; Inuit fur parkas; masks from Africa, Melanesia, and North America, as well as an early group used in Japanese Noh theater performances; and pottery, tools, weapons, boats, charms, and amulets from around the world-remain crammed into cases with small labels, many written by the museum's first curator, and grouped by type rather than place of origin.

A grant won through the Heritage Lottery Fund as well as gifts from other donors made the refurbishment possible. The upstairs gallery will reopen next year.
Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford · www.prm.ox.ac.uk

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