The Ure Museum’s modern collections include modern art created by 20th century artists who lived in Reading. These include Allen Seaby, whose prints and drawings are featured in “Allen Seaby’s Archaeology for Children“, our recent exhibition about Seaby’s archaeology books for children, and sculptors Eric Stanford and Jannis Athene, whose works feature in our sculpture trail “Beyond the Ure“.
Our modern collections also include reproductions of ancient art and artefacts, mostly plaster casts of sculpture and architectural ornament, both full-scale and miniature, and antiquarian gem casts. Some of our electrotype coins (reproductions of ancient coins) are on loan from the Heberden coin room at the Ashmolean Museum. We also possess a sizeable collection of squeezes (papier maché copies) of Athenian inscribed documents. A small collection of reproductions of ancient Greek musical instruments was bequeathed to us by an unnamed craftsperson who made them in the early 1970s for a PhD student then studying under the tutelage of Dr John Landels.