Ashmolean Given 'Extraordinary Gift' of Chinese Modern Art

Landscape by Zhang Daqian, one of the Chinese artworks gifted to the Ashmolean by Michael Sullivan. Photograph: Dan Dennison/Getty Images

More than 400 works that make up the finest private collection of Chinese modern art that exists in the west have been left to Britain’s oldest museum, it has been announced.

The Ashmolean in Oxford on Friday revealed details of what the museum’s director, Christopher Brown, called "an extraordinary gift".

The donor was Professor Michael Sullivan, a long-time friend of the Ashmolean, who died in September. Not only was he the pre-eminent western authority on modern Chinese art, he had also built up an astonishing collection – often buying directly from the artists themselves – which filled the walls of his Oxford flat.

Behind the bequest is a touching love story. Sullivan, a conscientious objector during the second world war, initially went to China in 1940 to drive lorries for the Red Cross. There he fell in love, first with the country, its history and its art, and then with Wu Baohuan, who became his wife in 1943 and thereafter became known as Khoan Sullivan.

After the war, Sullivan founded the art museum at the University of Malaya in Singapore and became professor of oriental art at Stanford University in California.

With his wife able to open doors, the Sullivans began making lasting friendships with significant Chinese artists. They gave him work and he began to become serious about buying it, building up a remarkable collection over 70 years.

Khoan died a decade ago but Sullivan continued to collect until near the end of his life.

Shelagh Vainker, the Ashmolean’s curator of Chinese art, said that Sullivan was "tremendously revered in China" and that an exhibition in his honour was staged at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in 2012. This included works from his collection and also photographs of the Sullivans in China.

Brown recalled receiving a box of books about 18 months ago that had been packed away from his childhood. He opened it to discover a long-forgotten paperback copy of a seminal book on Chinese art by Sullivan, first published in 1959.

"I must have asked for it as a school prize and evidently I had read it – in showing it to Michael I didn’t have to rough it up in any way."

The bequeathed works are still being valued but have been conservatively valued at more than £15m. They include paintings by artists such as Qi Baishi, Zhang Daqian and Xu Bing.

The Ashmolean already has the best collection of modern Chinese art of any museum in Europe, one that it began collecting in the 1950s.

In addition to the bequest, the Ashmolean announced a 2014 exhibitions programme that will include shows of work by Cézanne and William Blake, and one on that most enduring of subjects, Tutankhamun.

The summer show will be staged in what is the 75th anniversary year of Oxford’s Griffith Institute, home of renowned Egyptological archives. It will shine a light on Howard Carter’s discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb in 1922, as well as exploring the mania for the subject in popular culture that followed.