 The first such museum was the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, opened in 1683 to house and display the artefacts of Elias Ashmole that were given to Oxford University in a bequest.The Kunstmuseum Basel, through its lineage which extends back to the Amerbach Cabinet, a collection of works by Hans Holbein purchased by the city of Basel in 1661, is the first museum of art open to the public in the world.In the second half of the eighteenth century, many private collections of art were opened to the public, and during and after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars many royal collections were nationalized, even where the monarchy remained in place, as in Spain and Bavaria.