HELEN PEACOCKE admires a new exhibition showing important recent acquisitions by the Ashmolean Museum

It may not be the largest exhibition ever staged at the Ashmolean Museum, but Recent Acquisitions of British Drawings and Watercolours certainly ranks among the most important. It is a show which brings together some of the museum's most striking acquisitions in the field of British drawings and watercolours from the 17th to the 20th century over the past six years.

Perhaps the most spectacular of these is the great Romantic landscape painting, The Prospect by Samuel Palmer, which was acquired in October last year following a public appeal for funds and support from the National Art Collections Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

Procuring this remarkable watercolour, painted in 1881, was significant, particularly as the Ashmolean had no works by Palmer dated later than 1849, apart from etchings.

The Ashmolean collection of Palmer's early works, which was formed largely during the 1930s and 1940s when the artist was unfashionable and went unrecognised, is now considered the most important in the world.

The Prospect is one of eight large watercolours illustrating Milton's twin lyric pastorales L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, poems for which Palmer had always had a special affection and admiration. It is the only painting in this series in a British collection.

The painting depicting an imaginary pastoral scene, with a rural English foreground and a sunny bay redolent of Naples in the background, is considered one of the greatest achievements of Palmer's later years. What is more, as it was one of the last pictures the artist completed, it is thought to be a summation of his working life. Acquiring The Prospect, therefore, was a real coup and enriches the collection considerably, as does Palmer's Yellow Twilight, one of the last works of his period in Shoreham, Sussex, to remain in private hands. It was allocated to the museum by the Government, which accepted it in lieu of inheritance tax earlier this year. The Prospect will normally be kept in the Ashmolean Print Room where works of art on paper, which are susceptible to damage from light, are put on view.

At the moment, it hangs in The Eldon Gallery, along with other works acquired recently. These include a group of pictures presented by the Christoper Sands Trust such as Noctes Ambrosiane, a pastel of the interior of the Middlesex Music Hall by Walter Sickert, and a group of drawings acquired through The Art Fund, presented by Prof Luke Herrmann, a former Assistant Keeper in the Ashmolean.

Prof Herrmann had inherited them from the editor and proprietor of the Illustrated London News, Sir Bruce Ingram. They include the first watercolour by Richard Parkes Bonington to enter the Ashmolean's collection and a design by Sir James Thornhill for the chapel of All Souls College.

Other works of local interest include An f=iExhibition at the Old Town Hall, opainted in 1854 by George Pyn, which depicts several of the pre-Raphaelite masterpieces later bequeathed to the Ashmolean by Thomas Combe. This is an intriguing painting as it records the interior of Oxford's Georgian Town Hall, which was demolished in the early 1890s. Apparently, Combe would have had to work rapidly to capture so much detail. The exhibition he depicts only lasted a week, yet he managed to copy virtually every canvas displayed, many of which are so finely worked they can be identified easily. Look carefully and you will see: Millais's Return of the Dove to the Ark, and Collins's Convent Thoughts, which are now in the Ashmolean's collection. Millais's James Wyatt and his Granddaughter and Holman Hunt's New College Cloisters were part of that 1854 exhibition too.

Paul Nash's striking drawing of Wittenham Clumps is another of the recent acquisitions of local interest. Nash first visited the Clumps as a child and returned to paint them again and again throughout the rest of his life. He described them as the pyramids of his small world and painted them with great sensitivity.

Other works in the exhibition include a superb view of Christ Church painted by the other great English Romantic artist J.M.W.Turner, c1832.

Recent Acquisitions of British Drawings f=iand Watercolours ois on show until February 18. The show is open from Tuesday to Saturday between 10am and 5pm, and on Sunday from noon to 5pm.