Andrew Harper's Notebook: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

© Ashmolean Museum

The beloved but dusty and sepulchral Ashmolean Museum--named for Elias Ashmole, who donated his cabinet of curiosities to Oxford University in 1677--has undergone a dramatic, $96.6 million transformation. Reopened in fall 2009 with 39 new galleries, this is now one of the great small museums of the world. American-born architect Rick Mather installed a refined, almost ethereal five-story, modernist glass-and-steel structure behind the 17th-century neoclassical building. Even on a gray English day, light floods in like an Annunciation. The Ashmolean claims to own "the world's greatest collection of Raphael drawings, the most important collection of Egyptian pre-Dynastic material outside of Cairo, and the foremost collection of modern Chinese art in the western world." In essence it is a universal museum, like the Louvre or the Metropolitan, just one-20th the size. In the course of an afternoon, you feel that you have encountered, albeit glancingly, the whole of human cultural history. To read the rest of Andrew Harper’s Notebook column for Forbes Life, please visit here.