Bernard Ashmole

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Bernard Ashmole (1894, Ilford, Essex — 1988, Peebles, Scotland) was a British archaeologist and art historian (M.A., B. Litt., Oxford 1924), who specialized in ancient Greek sculpture. He was Professor of Classical Archaeology, University of London, 1929-1948. He was a collateral descendant of Elias Ashmole (1617-92), eponymous benefactor of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where he was briefly assistant keeper of coins.

In World War I he served with the Royal Fusiliers and was wounded at the Battle of the Somme (Military Cross). He married Dorothy De Peyer in 1920. At Oxford he studied with Percy Gardner and John Beazley, with whom he collaborated on the Greek art chapter for the Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd ed. (1928; separately issued, 1930) and whom he eventually succeeded to the Lincoln Chair of Classical Art at Oxford, on Beazley's retirement in 1956..

In 1925-28 he served as director of the British School at Rome, where he assisted in cataloguing the sculptures of the Palazzo dei Conservatori and developed a feel for modern sculpture and architect, from the young students at the School. On his return to the UK in 1929, he commissioned a modernist concrete-framed house in Amersham-on-the-Hill, Buckinghamshire, that is listed today for its architectural importance. His Late Archaic and Early Classical Greek Sculpture in Sicily and South Italy (1934) was developed from his Hertz lectures at the British Academy.

In 1939, Ashmole was appointed Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum following a public incident over abrasive cleaning of the Elgin Marbles; there he nurtured the budding careers of two generations of Classical scholars. In World War II he served again, in the Royal Air Force, (Hellenic Flying Cross).

He resigned his University of London chair in 1948 to concentrate on the post-war reinstallation of the British Museum. He retired from Oxford in 1961 to accept a chair in Greek Art and Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen, 1961-63; to be visiting professor at Yale University, 1964, and to give the Taft Lectures, Cincinnati), published as The Classical Ideal in Greek Sculpture (University of Cincinnati, 1964); to give the Wrightsman Lectures in New York (1967, published as Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece, 1972). He advised the oil billionaire J. Paul Getty on his classical art acquisitions of classical art.