THE MUSEUM WAS FOUNDED IN 1683 and moved into its current superbly neo-classical premises in Beaumont in 1845, a few years before the foundation of Britain’s new, radical artistic brotherhood in 1848. Two years later in 1850, Thomas Combe, one of the partners in Oxford University Press, invited a number of these ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ young men to his house at the press. The meeting was so successful that Combe began collecting paintings and drawings by the brotherhood until his death in 1872. His widow Martha subsequently left his collection to the Ashmolean after her own demise in 1893.
A number of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had close connections with Oxford and the Ashmolean Museum. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones were undergraduates at Oxford when they took up
