Jolly work at the Oxford Union

The story begins earlier in the century, in 1812, when two New College graduates began a social club and a debating society — partly as a means of debating the great issues of the day that the University did not wish students to discuss.

Rules were drawn up by 1822, debates began in 1823 and the Oxford Union Society was established fully in 1825. The society’s first debating rooms were in Wyatt’s, the picture dealer’s, at 115 High Street.

In 1852, the society moved to its present home in St Michael’s Street and five years later a debating hall was built. It was designed by the young Irish architect Benjamin Woodward, once described by Ruskin as ‘the silliest creature that ever breathed out of an oyster’. Others, however, found Woodward a charming, quiet and modest man. The chamber was in the gothic style and built of brick. Nikolaus Pevsner, the great architectural historian, finds this comparitively modest building much less memorable than Woodward’s other major Oxford work, the University Museum. He is surely right.

Even so, the long oblong chamber with canted north and south ends and fireplace in the middle — only two such fireplaces are said to remain in England — is both imposing and snug to this day. Above all, it had bare walls ‘hungry for pictures’.

Enter the Pre-Raphaelites. In that Long Vacation of 1857, Morris and Burne-Jones, former students of Exeter College and inseperable friends, met Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the first time.

Morris took Rossetti to Oxford, where they ran into Woodward. The latter showed them around his new debating hall, presumably with a touch of pride. Rossetti looked around the bare walls and had an idea.

As he records: “Without taking into consideration the purpose it was intended for (indeed hardly knowing of the latter) I offered to paint figures of some kind on the blank spaces of one of the gallery window bays; and another friend who was with us, William Morris, offered to do the same for the second bay. Woodward was greatly delighted with the idea.”

The president-elect, Bowen of Balliol College, supported the scheme enthusiastically, the building committee agreed and work started in that Long Vacation.

The roof beams of the debating hall divided the walls into ten bays, each containing two windows. Rossetti, with some prompting from Morris, decided on a set of murals on the general theme of the Arthurian legends, a popular subject of the day, whether through Tennyson’s Morte D’Arthur or Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.

The pictures were to be painted ‘on a large scale in distemper’, with Rossetti working on Sir Lancelot’s Vision of the Holy Grail and Morris on Tristram and Iseult, having rejected his earlier title Sudden Indisposition of Sir Tristram, recognisable as Collywobbles by the pile of gooseberries skins beside him. Many other well-known artists were invited to join the fun, including Scott, Madox Brown and possibly Millais. Perhaps because the artists were not to be paid (except for materials, lodging, travel and provisions), the established names declined.

Soon, Rossetti was writing that with “the exception of Arthur Hughes and myself, those engaged on the murals have made almost their debut as painters.”

John Hungerford Pollen had been a Fellow of Merton, Spencer Stanhope was a graduate of Christ Church, William and Briton Riviere, father and son, were locals. The last painter, Valentine Prinsep, a young man of 19 but already weighing 15 stone, was brought down from London. Arriving at the railway station and hailing a cab, he told it to drive to the Union. To his surprise, Prinsep found himself at the workhouse — the Oxford Union was still very much unknown in its infancy.

Prinsep enjoyed himself enormously in this great adventure: ’What fun we had at the Union! What jokes! What roars of laughter!’ A few days later he was seen carrying Burne-Jones under his arm up the steps of a ladder to the roof. The union had voted £500 for the murals and soon this essentially amateur enterprise was well underway. Rossetti had it right when he noted: “It is a very jolly work in itself, but really one is mad to do such things.” Ruskin added knowingly: “You know the fact is that they’re all the least bit crazy and it is very difficult to manage them.”

Drinking enormous amounts of free soda water — and constantly asking for someone to fetch more supplies — the work progressed: from King Arthur Obtaining the Sword Excalibur from the Damsel of the Lake by John Hungerford Pollen in bay one to Sir Pelleas leaving the Lady Ettarde by Valentine Prinsep in bay ten.

Edward Burne-Jones contributed Merlin being imprisoned beneath a stone by the Damsel of the Lake, Arthur Hughes Arthur carried away to Avalon and the Sword thrown back into the Lake and the instigator, Dante Gabriel Rossetti Sir Lancelot Prevented by his Sin from entering the Chapel of the San Grail. The titles were nothing if not precise and perhaps — for modern tastes –—too literal.

The group hoped to complete the murals in six weeks. They worked on the paintings from eight in the morning until the light failed. Pollen and Rossetti even worked at night by gaslight.

But in the event the work took longer and was never fully completed. For the male figures, the painters took turns to model for one another. For the female figures, they were ever ready to recruit local girls — they called them ‘stunners’.

On one occasion, Morris set off to sketch an attractive girl whose parents kept an inn at Godstow. Her mother, no doubt experienced in fending off the attentions of unwelcome undergraduates, sent him away with a flea in his ear. But they were luckier in the discovery of another ‘stunner’, Jane Burden.

Spotted by Rossetti at the theatre, she was persuaded to sit as a model. Her father was a stable hand, her mother a domestic servant and they lived in cramped quarters close to the Holywell Street stables (there is a Blue Plaque to Jane in St Helen’s Passage today).

Morris was immediately attracted to her beauty. She was tall, long-necked, with dark eyes and high cheekbones. By 1858 he had persuaded her to marry him.

Another Oxford friend, the poet Swinburne was horrified: “the idea of his marrying her is insane. To kiss her feet is the utmost man should think of doing.”

Morris worked fast on his mural and when it was finished, started on the ceiling, painting in dark colours a large number of all kinds of “quaint beast and birds”. Later, in 1875, he repainted it in lighter colours, with repeated blocks of interlocking flora, the sort of design that he was to use for wallpaper and fabrics throughout his life.

Meanwhile the relationship of the disparate group of pre-Raphaelites with the University and Oxford society was not easy. Morris’s informal dress caused problems: he was turned away at the door by an alarmed maid who ‘feared for the silver’ and when they were invited to dine at Christ Church, Rossetti turned up in the plum-coloured frock-coat he wore for painting.

They were against the middle-class values held by a large part of Oxford society. The latter were not impressed by what they saw, and there are records of Burne-Jones and Rossetti being drenched by buckets of dirty water poured from the gallery of the debating chamber.

But if Oxford in general dismissed their work, Ruskin in particular admired the Arthurian murals. He called Rossetti’s painting “the finest piece of colouring in the worl” while the poet Coventry Patmore described them as ‘so brilliant as to make the walls look like the margin of an illuminated manuscript.”.

But here the troubles began. Rossetti knew very little about preparing surfaces. The debating chamber was newly built, and the murals were painted in distemper on a coat of whitewash applied to damp walls. All too soon the colours began to fade away. As a result, Rossetti quickly lost interest after his initial enthusiasm and could not be bothered to finish his painting.

He then argued with William Riviere, an Oxford painter but not a Pre-Raphaelite, who was commissioned to fill the three still empty bays with pictures of Arthur’s Education under Merlin, Arthur’s First Victory and The Wedding of Arthur and Guinevere. As to plans to rescue the fading murals, Rossetti’s view was simple: “the one remedy for all this is whitewash, and I shall be happy to hear of its application.”

For the next 80 years, the paintings were neither restored nor whitewashed, but left to fade away. Then, in 1935, a 15 month restoration was undertaken.

At the unveiling the following year, according to James Morris, when the lights went on and the excited guests, including descendants of Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones and Prinsep, looked up at the walls and the ceiling, they were just as invisible as before. The murals were again restored at some expense in 1986 and unveiled in the presence of Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins (the day before he was elected Chancellor of the University). Today, large and colourful Arthurian figures can still be seen dimly but only by electric light.

But let the last word go to Topsy, the nickname of William Morris among his Oxford friends.

In a letter to James Thursfield in 1869, he writes: “I am sorry you are in trouble about the works at the union. As for my own picture, I believe it has some merits as to colour, but I must confess I should feel more comfortable if it had disappeared from the wall, as I am conscious of it being extremely ludicrous in many ways. Nevertheless it would surely be a pity to destroy some of the pictures, which are really remarkable, and at worst can do no harm there.”

Ludicrous or not, assuredly the murals continue to do no harm. And they act as a graphic reminder of the time when the Oxford Union put art equal to wordly ambition — when speakers in the debating chamber were heard not only by fellow students but also by King Arthur, Queen Guinevere and their court, gazing down from above.