Art

Gandhara Sculpture at Oxford

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Here are a few of the highlights from the Buddhist sculpture on display at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford which I visited last week. The museum has had a massive redevelopment since I last visited and the galleries are very beautifully displayed and most informative.

The Gandhara sculptures combine the best of East and West – essentially where the sophistication of Greek sculpture meets the depth of Indian spiritual sensibility.  Over at Vipassana Fellowship our logo has always been based on a Gandhara image (though not from this collection) and I find it the most beautiful form of the Buddhist sculptors’ art.

Catching up, Cotswolds and Cathedrals

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I’ve been catching up with friends over the past few days.  It has been lovely to meet an old colleague from my theatre days in her home town of Cheltenham, to spend some time together driving through the Cotswold villages and on to Cirencester and Malmesbury and to finally have a chance to visit the splendidly revamped Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Yesterday we headed – via a hasty glimpse of Gloucester Cathedral – to meet more friends in Hereford who had come over from Wales to see Mappa Mundi, explore Hereford Cathedral and have a mooch about the city. We loved Hereford Cathedral with its shrines to St Thomas of Hereford and St Ethelbert (and the recent art commissions are very well chosen) but thought the Mappa Mundi and the chained library displays were disappointing. We hadn’t intended to stay for evensong but were very glad we did when we heard the fine singing of Tallis and Grieg from the Cathedral’s choir.