1 00:00:00,360 --> 00:00:08,760 Hi, my name is Dr. Caroline Batten, and I'm here today for Oxford Fantasy with Tom Corrick, who is the librarian of the Oxford Union Library. 2 00:00:08,760 --> 00:00:20,400 And today we are going to be talking about the famous Morte D'Arthur Murals in the Union Library and how they have influenced fantasy literature and Oxford. 3 00:00:20,400 --> 00:00:24,000 Thank you for being here, Tom. Thank you for having me, Caroline. 4 00:00:24,000 --> 00:00:29,050 It's a real pleasure to talk about the murals in an online context where 5 00:00:29,050 --> 00:00:33,880 hopefully lots of people get to see and learn a little bit more about the place. 6 00:00:33,880 --> 00:00:45,370 Yeah, absolutely, so I know relatively little about the murals, actually, so I guess please start with the basics, introduce us to these works of art. 7 00:00:45,370 --> 00:00:56,800 OK, so the murals were painted between 1857 and 1859 by a group of guys called – well, who call themselves Pre-Raphaelites. 8 00:00:56,800 --> 00:01:04,960 And the murals themselves are located in the Oxford Union Society, which is a student debating society in the centre of Oxford. 9 00:01:04,960 --> 00:01:16,540 And what is now the library was the original debating hall, and the Pre-Raphaelites came in and decorated these giant panels in the debating hall, themselves. 10 00:01:16,540 --> 00:01:22,750 So the Pre-Raphaelites themselves were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was an artist; you had Valentine 11 00:01:22,750 --> 00:01:28,000 Prinsep, who was also an artist. John Hungerford Pollen, who was a fellow of Merton. 12 00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:33,100 You had William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. They're both undergraduates of Exeter College. 13 00:01:33,100 --> 00:01:38,050 And they also went on to become successful artists in their own right. Roddam Spencer Stanhope, 14 00:01:38,050 --> 00:01:43,630 who was at Christchurch; Arthur Hughes, who was also another artist. And then you had William and Briton Riviere, 15 00:01:43,630 --> 00:01:49,340 who are professional artists who came in and sort of finished the job, which we'll talk about a bit later. 16 00:01:49,340 --> 00:01:54,250 Morris and Burne-Jones were kind of the bigger names, as well as Rossetti. 17 00:01:54,250 --> 00:01:59,320 They came into contact with Rossetti, who was already well-established artist by this point. 18 00:01:59,320 --> 00:02:08,410 They came in contact with him at evening art classes and they kind of collected the rest of the team via associations with this Victorian art world. 19 00:02:08,410 --> 00:02:12,040 So with the exception of William and Briton Riviere, 20 00:02:12,040 --> 00:02:17,890 these guys will basically form the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelite movement; there had been a first wave a few years prior, 21 00:02:17,890 --> 00:02:25,210 which kind of lost momentum. And this, this project really kick-started the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. 22 00:02:25,210 --> 00:02:33,330 Oh, I didn't actually know that, that the murals united the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 23 00:02:33,330 --> 00:02:42,010 Yes. So there were a few of the original first wave, such as a Holman Hunt, who kind of took one look at the project and said, absolutely no way. 24 00:02:42,010 --> 00:02:46,660 Good luck with that. And luckily, luckily, things turned out quite well. 25 00:02:46,660 --> 00:02:54,680 But yeah. So this is definitely sort of a catalyst for that second wave of the Pre-Raphs. 26 00:02:54,680 --> 00:03:07,190 So, I mean, when we talk about how they were made, Rossetti was originally commissioned to paint a large project for the Oxford History Museum, 27 00:03:07,190 --> 00:03:11,930 he was meant to paint Newton gathering pebbles on the shores of the Ocean of Truth. 28 00:03:11,930 --> 00:03:20,390 But he wasn't really keen on the idea. And his friend, Benjamin Woodward, who was the architect of the Oxford History Museum, basically said, well, 29 00:03:20,390 --> 00:03:26,900 I've actually got this other project on the go and that other project turned out to be the debating hall of the Oxford Union Society. 30 00:03:26,900 --> 00:03:32,030 So Rossetti came over and had a look and said, yes, this is this is kind of the one for me, really. 31 00:03:32,030 --> 00:03:37,640 This is what I'd like to really sort of do to make my mark on the, on the scene. 32 00:03:37,640 --> 00:03:46,010 I think a large part of that is because you have this sort of Arthurian almost obsession for the Pre-Raphs, which we'll talk about shortly. 33 00:03:46,010 --> 00:03:56,540 And the hall itself is very much modelled on a sort of a mediaeval banqueting hall, a meeting, sort of Victorian Venetian Gothic as well. 34 00:03:56,540 --> 00:04:00,020 So it's very unique shape. I think that Rossetti must have seen it and gone Aha, 35 00:04:00,020 --> 00:04:07,340 we've got a banquet hall here. So you can see in this picture here that it's actually broken up into a series of bays 36 00:04:07,340 --> 00:04:13,730 and they just lend themselves, the space lends itself really well to sort of showing the depictions of the Arthurian 37 00:04:13,730 --> 00:04:24,150 myth. However, you know, these guys are relatively inexperienced in terms of sort of doing large scale projects like this. 38 00:04:24,150 --> 00:04:32,580 Whilst Rossetti had a background in painting, he didn't really have a background in painting on buildings or fresco style. 39 00:04:32,580 --> 00:04:35,280 And his, the rest of the cohort certainly didn't. 40 00:04:35,280 --> 00:04:41,040 Some of them were still undergraduates at this stage and some of them had only ever sort of painted on canvas, really. 41 00:04:41,040 --> 00:04:48,190 So we can see here, this is Rosetti's sort of a depiction of Sir Lancelot's vision of the Holy Grail. 42 00:04:48,190 --> 00:04:52,140 Down here on the bottom right is a sleeping Lancelot. 43 00:04:52,140 --> 00:05:03,450 And in the centre of the actual sort of panel itself, is Guinevere stopping him from entering, the sort of the personification of the Holy Grail. 44 00:05:03,450 --> 00:05:08,610 And what I've done actually in the other sort of panel in the bottom right is highlighted the brickwork that's 45 00:05:08,610 --> 00:05:15,030 coming through and give you an idea of how little they actually prepared the surface of this, and how remarkable it is that 46 00:05:15,030 --> 00:05:21,120 we still actually have these surviving on our walls some hundred and fifty years later. 47 00:05:21,120 --> 00:05:27,840 The actual the physical aspect of the painting is, they did very little groundwork 48 00:05:27,840 --> 00:05:32,580 in preparing the actual site because the building was so new it hadn't fully dried out. 49 00:05:32,580 --> 00:05:37,900 So what ended up happening was the the minerals from the brickwork actually seeped through 50 00:05:37,900 --> 00:05:41,400 the paint because it was pretty much bare paints that they put straight onto the walls. 51 00:05:41,400 --> 00:05:46,470 They didn't lay out a plaster or anything. So it's it's not technically a fresco. 52 00:05:46,470 --> 00:05:50,730 I think it's a form of distemper was what they actually used. 53 00:05:50,730 --> 00:05:57,280 The contemporary accounts tell us that these were really, really vibrant murals when they were first finished. 54 00:05:57,280 --> 00:06:03,780 And the sort of the heavy influence was, you know, mediaeval illuminated manuscripts. 55 00:06:03,780 --> 00:06:07,340 And according to contemporary accounts, you know, they very much resemble these. 56 00:06:07,340 --> 00:06:11,490 And apparently they really sort of, the colour really popped off of the wall. 57 00:06:11,490 --> 00:06:19,050 And there's lots of fine detail and stuff which has been kind of been lost over time. And so, yeah, there's another example of 58 00:06:19,050 --> 00:06:24,330 this sort of deterioration here, which is the death of Arthur. So I don't know if you can see my cursor here, 59 00:06:24,330 --> 00:06:30,900 but you can see in the centre you've got Arthur having defeated his nemesis, Mordred, in the final battle. 60 00:06:30,900 --> 00:06:37,360 He himself was gravely wounded. And here you have him casting Excalibur back into the lake. 61 00:06:37,360 --> 00:06:43,590 And you can see it's very, very tricky to make this out. But apparently this is one of the more stunning murals at the time. 62 00:06:43,590 --> 00:06:55,470 But given the the dark colours and the poorly-prepared surface, it's, you see here that it's really quite tricky to make out just exactly what's going on. 63 00:06:55,470 --> 00:07:02,470 But we'll come back to this as as we sort of make our way through. 64 00:07:02,470 --> 00:07:09,850 And right, so one of your questions was explaining a little bit about who the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were, 65 00:07:09,850 --> 00:07:17,050 and what were their guiding, artistic principles. So, here we've got a lovely shot of the Rossetti mural as well, 66 00:07:17,050 --> 00:07:22,870 putting it in a bit more context. As I said, this was the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelites. 67 00:07:22,870 --> 00:07:29,440 So the first wave of William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Rossetti himself, and a couple of others. 68 00:07:29,440 --> 00:07:36,430 And they started in 1848. The second wave included Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris and more. 69 00:07:36,430 --> 00:07:42,670 And these ones, sort of ended up painting in the library. 70 00:07:42,670 --> 00:07:46,780 These murals represent probably the most important collaboration between the Pre-Raphaelite artists. 71 00:07:46,780 --> 00:07:53,890 You know, I mentioned that this is very much the catalyst for change and they've never really worked together on such a large scale project since. 72 00:07:53,890 --> 00:08:00,640 And also, these are the largest paintings ever done by the sort of collective. The Pre-Raphaelites themselves, 73 00:08:00,640 --> 00:08:07,810 they were mainly concerned with producing what they perceived as sort of ideal beauty; so, abundant details, 74 00:08:07,810 --> 00:08:12,700 lots of intense colours, quite complex compositions. 75 00:08:12,700 --> 00:08:19,810 There's a heavy emphasis on sort of nature and pastoral imagery, as well as sort of mediaeval mythology. 76 00:08:19,810 --> 00:08:23,740 The term 'Pre-Raphaelite' itself comes from the fact that they believe that art produced 77 00:08:23,740 --> 00:08:30,310 after Raphael in the 15th century had become sort of too mechanistic and academic. 78 00:08:30,310 --> 00:08:37,780 And it became dominated by the establishment and the Royal Academy of Arts, 79 00:08:37,780 --> 00:08:43,840 especially for these guys in that period, the Royal Academy of Arts really comes to dominate the cultural scene. 80 00:08:43,840 --> 00:08:53,200 And the Pre-Raphaelites are more concerned in pushing back against that. And I think there's also an element of sort of anti-industrialisation as well. 81 00:08:53,200 --> 00:09:01,080 And that really ties in with Morris's later work as well, which I'll probably touch on further in this talk. 82 00:09:01,080 --> 00:09:09,640 So is there anything you'd like to kind of chip in now with, Caroline? I think with interest Oxford fantasy audiences about the Pre-Raphaelites 83 00:09:09,640 --> 00:09:12,640 is that their sort of interest in the mediaeval, 84 00:09:12,640 --> 00:09:21,610 really inspired writers like Lewis and Tolkien in their approach to the mediaeval and their sort of idealisation of the mediaeval. 85 00:09:21,610 --> 00:09:30,880 And so sword and sorcery fantasy in a way, bears the hallmarks of the Pre-Raphaelite obsession with Arturiana, 86 00:09:30,880 --> 00:09:34,240 because it's this this is why we have sword and sorcery, right, 87 00:09:34,240 --> 00:09:39,640 rather than all of our fantasy being set in ancient Rome or whatever. 88 00:09:39,640 --> 00:09:44,740 The sort of pseudo-mediaeval atmosphere of fantasy owes a lot to this movement. 89 00:09:44,740 --> 00:09:52,960 Yes, absolutely. Let's let's take a deep dive into showing you some of those swords. 90 00:09:52,960 --> 00:10:05,590 So the Oxford murals are basically based around Malory's Morte D'Arthur and that depiction of the Arthurian myth. 91 00:10:05,590 --> 00:10:14,830 So here we can see John Hungerford Pollen's depiction of Arthur receiving his sword, Excalibur, from the Lady of the Lake. 92 00:10:14,830 --> 00:10:18,850 There's a fantastic thing in the background, just a real menagerie of animals. 93 00:10:18,850 --> 00:10:20,680 So there's quite a lot of artistic licence here. 94 00:10:20,680 --> 00:10:26,260 My favourite thing is kind of on the right hand side, you can just make out the hooves of the donkey that they presumably rode in on. 95 00:10:26,260 --> 00:10:27,970 Legend has it just beneath that, 96 00:10:27,970 --> 00:10:36,610 what looks suspiciously like a rock is actually a wombat because Rossetti was obsessed with wombats and this is sort of seen as little Easter egg, 97 00:10:36,610 --> 00:10:43,180 whether that holds weight or not who can say. Here you can really see how this is the quintessential thing of, you know, you've got the Lady of the Lake, 98 00:10:43,180 --> 00:10:48,290 you got the arm coming up, you got the big massive sword and you've got Arthur stooping down to collect it. 99 00:10:48,290 --> 00:10:54,750 I mean, it's this iconic part of the whole mythos. 100 00:10:54,750 --> 00:11:00,690 So this is William and Briton Riviere's panel, we don't know which one actually painted it, 101 00:11:00,690 --> 00:11:07,320 they were a father and son team and these guys actually came in because the Pre-Raphs didn't finish all the panels. 102 00:11:07,320 --> 00:11:11,910 So these, this father and son were professional artists, and they actually did 103 00:11:11,910 --> 00:11:14,550 know what they were doing and prepared the surface just a little bit better, 104 00:11:14,550 --> 00:11:21,360 which is why these are more vibrant and there's a couple of other panels by them that we'll see as well. 105 00:11:21,360 --> 00:11:32,310 But they weren't so up to speed on the sort of, the detail that was involved in the Morte D'Arthur, all the sort of knights errant and things like that. 106 00:11:32,310 --> 00:11:42,840 Instead, they sort of worked with more a Victorian stereotypical view of the Arthurian myths, which is just, you know, battles essentially. 107 00:11:42,840 --> 00:11:46,230 So this is this is one of the few things where there's actually a big sword fight because, you know, 108 00:11:46,230 --> 00:11:55,210 they assumed that people love seeing sword fights, and which the Pre-Raphs themselves had a slightly different take on. 109 00:11:55,210 --> 00:12:01,810 So this is very early William Morris, probably one of his early, earliest surviving paintings, 110 00:12:01,810 --> 00:12:07,720 and you can just see at the top there that that is the ceiling, which is the quintessential William Morris print. 111 00:12:07,720 --> 00:12:11,650 And that's very much contrasted with what we're actually seeing here. 112 00:12:11,650 --> 00:12:20,680 So this is his depiction of Tristram and La Belle Iseult, which I probably butchered saying, but it's a classic tale. 113 00:12:20,680 --> 00:12:28,370 And Sir Tristram himself has actually just had a duel with Sir Palamides, 114 00:12:28,370 --> 00:12:38,560 who you can see on the bottom left, over the the affections of Iseult and it's tricky to make out, 115 00:12:38,560 --> 00:12:47,860 but you're starting to see some of Morris' sort of obsessions with the natural world, which fits in with the Pre-Raphaelites' wider ethos. 116 00:12:47,860 --> 00:12:52,630 And it's a lot of detail there. And those sunflowers and the forest imagery and things. 117 00:12:52,630 --> 00:13:01,710 Interestingly, it's believed that Sir Tristram in the top right there is actually based on Algernon Charles Swinburne because he 118 00:13:01,710 --> 00:13:09,040 was a friend of theirs and he was certainly around at the time and had come to see the murals being painted, 119 00:13:09,040 --> 00:13:13,930 although he didn't actually really want anything to do with them. But I think they added him in as a model. 120 00:13:13,930 --> 00:13:21,420 So that's a nice little bit there. Here we have Edward Burne-Jones and we have the death of Merlin, 121 00:13:21,420 --> 00:13:27,870 so you'll note that this Merlin looks very different to other depictions of Merlin and this is something that I also mentioned as well, 122 00:13:27,870 --> 00:13:31,680 the lack of kind of consistency here between the artists. 123 00:13:31,680 --> 00:13:33,060 There was a grand overall plan, 124 00:13:33,060 --> 00:13:41,880 but I think that fell by the wayside very quickly when they kind of just took their pick from the various scenes of the legend of Arthur. 125 00:13:41,880 --> 00:13:51,270 So what is happening here essentially is that you've got Nimue, who's on the left hand side, who's... she's quite an ambiguous figure. 126 00:13:51,270 --> 00:13:57,900 She's sometimes depicted as the Lady of the Lake and she's sometimes seen as an independent character as well. 127 00:13:57,900 --> 00:14:02,370 But feel free to step in, Caroline, if that's slightly mixed up. 128 00:14:02,370 --> 00:14:05,160 But from what I can tell, that's that's what's happening there. 129 00:14:05,160 --> 00:14:12,600 And on the right hand side, you have Merlin, and in the centre, you can just make out that well in the bottom centre and sort of above that, 130 00:14:12,600 --> 00:14:19,200 there's actually and it's quite difficult to make out here as a big stone on a chain. Now, according to this myth, 131 00:14:19,200 --> 00:14:26,070 Merlin essentially pursues Nimue and after a while she gets sick of him and ends 132 00:14:26,070 --> 00:14:30,780 up basically banishing him under a rock is the official sort of narrative. 133 00:14:30,780 --> 00:14:38,760 But in this case, I think that Burne-Jones has taken a bit of licence and said that she's going to put him down the well instead and seal him in there. 134 00:14:38,760 --> 00:14:45,360 And that's quite an interesting take on this sort of the idea of chivalry and things like that, really, especially in a modern context, 135 00:14:45,360 --> 00:14:55,110 when you have this idea of a lady like sort of taking it to her own hands and just banishing this really pushy guy into a well, 136 00:14:55,110 --> 00:14:59,700 which I think is great. So that's kind of what's happening here. 137 00:14:59,700 --> 00:15:02,080 I mean, it's fantastic detail on Merlin's sleeves. 138 00:15:02,080 --> 00:15:09,030 And we actually have some infrared photography done a while back and the details that came out that were great. 139 00:15:09,030 --> 00:15:15,090 My favourite part is on the horizon. At the top is a nice golden sheen and it's just really beautiful. 140 00:15:15,090 --> 00:15:20,090 And you can imagine how, again, this must have looked like an illuminated manuscript when it was first done. 141 00:15:20,090 --> 00:15:25,820 Yeah, it's very interesting also about the Merlin story is that often iterations of that story say 142 00:15:25,820 --> 00:15:33,680 that Nimue traps Merlin in a crystal cave, and we've gone in a very different direction here, 143 00:15:33,680 --> 00:15:40,940 sort of darker, more personal, less romantic in a way. 144 00:15:40,940 --> 00:15:48,200 Yeah, absolutely. And when I was doing some reading around on this topic, I couldn't find any other depictions of a well, specifically. 145 00:15:48,200 --> 00:15:55,040 So I'll be very interested to see where Burne-Jones got the inspiration for that from. A little claustrophobic, isn't it? 146 00:15:55,040 --> 00:15:59,510 Yes. Yes. And it sounds like he deserved it as well. 147 00:15:59,510 --> 00:16:04,220 And so this is another sort of slightly odd one, really. 148 00:16:04,220 --> 00:16:10,310 So this is Sir Gawain and the three damsels at the fountain, and this I think is by Roddam Spencer Stanhope, and this, I think, 149 00:16:10,310 --> 00:16:17,750 is where things start getting slightly off-piste from the traditional Arthurian myth because it's not a really well known scene, 150 00:16:17,750 --> 00:16:22,670 this. This is very much a sort of, you know – Sir Gawain, 151 00:16:22,670 --> 00:16:29,220 his reward for doing a quest is getting to choose a damsel, which is quite, quite problematic in this day and age. 152 00:16:29,220 --> 00:16:32,770 And it's very much a side quest, really. 153 00:16:32,770 --> 00:16:36,440 It's not what you think of when you think of the Arthurian myth. 154 00:16:36,440 --> 00:16:42,320 So you have three ladies here, and you have the 60 year old, a 30 year old, and you have a 15 year old. 155 00:16:42,320 --> 00:16:46,790 And you can probably guess by the sort of composition of this, which is which. 156 00:16:46,790 --> 00:16:53,700 And and obviously, Gawain ends up sort of choosing the 15 year old and, 157 00:16:53,700 --> 00:17:01,230 whatever that entails, but you can see here that the competition is really interesting because Gawain is very 158 00:17:01,230 --> 00:17:05,760 much a side figure here and this ties into, sort of, the Pre-Raphaelites are obsessed with this, 159 00:17:05,760 --> 00:17:13,020 you know, this idea of the ideal beauty. And, you know, they place this this beauty right, 160 00:17:13,020 --> 00:17:14,860 right at the forefront of the image. 161 00:17:14,860 --> 00:17:20,850 And once you get your eye in, you can see that there's really spectacular and really detailed foliage in the background. 162 00:17:20,850 --> 00:17:27,120 But it's all overshadowed by this, you know, this beautiful lady who's depicted and again, 163 00:17:27,120 --> 00:17:31,170 the knight, and you can just make out his sword there, he's not the centre of this. 164 00:17:31,170 --> 00:17:38,070 It's not that sort of chivalric ideal of having a big guy with a sword just taking centre stage. 165 00:17:38,070 --> 00:17:43,370 He's been, you know, literally pushed off to the side. This is quite interesting, I think. 166 00:17:43,370 --> 00:17:50,040 And so, you know, back to the death of Arthur. 167 00:17:50,040 --> 00:17:53,520 He's about to go off on a dusky barge to Avalon, I think, 168 00:17:53,520 --> 00:17:59,250 and you can see Sir Bedivere on the left hand side casting 169 00:17:59,250 --> 00:18:03,960 Excalibur back into the lake, and you can see the wonderful glowing arm there. 170 00:18:03,960 --> 00:18:09,750 It's a slightly confusing composition because it looks like one of the central, 171 00:18:09,750 --> 00:18:16,850 I think it's one of the queens, it looks like she's casting off, but it's actually Sir Bedivere on the left hand side. 172 00:18:16,850 --> 00:18:27,660 And yeah. So this is his final death scene. And in terms of the way the actual building is laid out, this is directly opposite 173 00:18:27,660 --> 00:18:33,120 when he gets the sword from the Lady of the Lake in the first instance. 174 00:18:33,120 --> 00:18:40,800 So there was a plan to have these murals facing each other and telling some sort of coherent narrative. 175 00:18:40,800 --> 00:18:46,320 And we know this from contemporary letters and accounts, but that fell by the wayside very quickly. 176 00:18:46,320 --> 00:18:53,130 And as we saw, they kind of ended up putting in depictions of side quests and weddings and battles. 177 00:18:53,130 --> 00:18:58,500 And so here we've got the education of Merlin. Again, this is William and Briton Riviere. 178 00:18:58,500 --> 00:19:04,200 And again, you can really see that they kind of knew what they're doing a little bit more in terms of preparing the surface. 179 00:19:04,200 --> 00:19:10,530 And this is a far more Victorian, classic perception of the story. 180 00:19:10,530 --> 00:19:16,740 You've got Merlin with a big beard and his big staff and Arthur gazing up adoringly. 181 00:19:16,740 --> 00:19:27,120 And interestingly, just above Arthur, you have a little, as a sort of, this reminds me of the ghost at the feast, almost, a little ghostly figure. 182 00:19:27,120 --> 00:19:29,910 And it's never really explained what he's doing there. 183 00:19:29,910 --> 00:19:35,190 So whether that's previous work coming through or whether it's meant to mean something else, who knows? 184 00:19:35,190 --> 00:19:44,560 But it's a little detail there. And here we've got Arthur's wedding to Guinevere. Again, this one really pops out because it was William and Briton Riviere. 185 00:19:44,560 --> 00:19:51,120 And so that's quite an irony here in that people come to the Union to see the Pre-Raphaelite murals, 186 00:19:51,120 --> 00:19:58,650 but what they actually tend to see the most is this father and son duo who weren't Pre-Raphaelites at all. I mean, Briton 187 00:19:58,650 --> 00:20:07,090 Riviere, in his own right, was a very well established artist, but he was never sort of part of that group. I don't think he had as much of an ideology behind him. 188 00:20:07,090 --> 00:20:13,950 He liked to paint and get paid for it, whereas the Pre-Raphaelites, part of their whole sort of chivalric code, I guess, 189 00:20:13,950 --> 00:20:21,690 was doing art for the love of art, and they could afford to do that sort of stuff without necessarily being paid. 190 00:20:21,690 --> 00:20:23,820 So, again, there's a lot of symbolism here. 191 00:20:23,820 --> 00:20:30,150 It's a bad omen, apparently, to have a white stag charging through your wedding, which sounds like a terrible thing to happen, 192 00:20:30,150 --> 00:20:36,540 I guess, even if you're not Arthur and Guinevere, and you can see the knights looking on quite aghast at this thing that's happened. 193 00:20:36,540 --> 00:20:40,590 And one thing to note is that the perspective is all slightly off here as well. 194 00:20:40,590 --> 00:20:44,460 And we think it was Briton who did this because he was the son of the duo. 195 00:20:44,460 --> 00:20:52,430 And you can see that Arthur's got a very large arm, and a very prominent English shield, which is sort of a bit clunky. 196 00:20:52,430 --> 00:21:04,850 But presumably they were still learning as they were going on. And finally, we will go back to Rosetti's vision of the Holy Grail. 197 00:21:04,850 --> 00:21:10,430 So this is kind of the centrepiece of it all, really. This is the sort of the most fantastic image. 198 00:21:10,430 --> 00:21:13,980 And there's lots of symbolism going on here. 199 00:21:13,980 --> 00:21:21,400 So you have the the serpent on Lancelot's shield and obviously conjuring up images of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. 200 00:21:21,400 --> 00:21:29,460 And I think there's a lot of, sort of, similarities between sort of biblical imagery and so that Christ-like 201 00:21:29,460 --> 00:21:37,160 figure of Arthur and his apostles or his Knights of the Round Table, disciples, 202 00:21:37,160 --> 00:21:42,390 a lot of commingling there in terms of imagery and storytelling. 203 00:21:42,390 --> 00:21:44,040 But I think at this point, 204 00:21:44,040 --> 00:21:51,300 it's Lancelot's own sin that prevents him from actually getting through to the Holy Grail on the left hand side here, 205 00:21:51,300 --> 00:21:56,190 because, you know, him and Guinevere had an affair, essentially. 206 00:21:56,190 --> 00:22:06,960 But it's quite a twist on the classic take in that it's Lancelot who is the fallen man here, rather than having Guinevere as the fallen woman. 207 00:22:06,960 --> 00:22:15,390 So Guinevere's still centre stage, still standing up tall, slight imagery of Christ on the cross there, in that sort of stance. 208 00:22:15,390 --> 00:22:19,950 But it's Lancelot himself who's actually the one who is down there in the dirt. 209 00:22:19,950 --> 00:22:24,630 And that's really unusual, I think, for, 210 00:22:24,630 --> 00:22:28,320 as we keep saying, for Victorian depictions of Arthur. 211 00:22:28,320 --> 00:22:34,320 You know that again, they're these guys who can't do any wrong. But here we have Lancelot on the floor, you know, paying the price, really. 212 00:22:34,320 --> 00:22:39,480 The Pre-Raphaelites did love a femme fatale, didn't they? 213 00:22:39,480 --> 00:22:46,680 Absolutely. Yes. And so, I mean, it's an interesting selection of scenes, really. 214 00:22:46,680 --> 00:22:51,360 And I think Rossetti basically had, you know, as I mentioned, 215 00:22:51,360 --> 00:23:00,510 he conceived the paintings as pairs of sort of complementary subjects, revolving around getting the sword and then having to give the sword back. 216 00:23:00,510 --> 00:23:04,510 And it didn't really work. 217 00:23:04,510 --> 00:23:07,620 And there's a practical reason why it didn't work as well, 218 00:23:07,620 --> 00:23:15,230 because essentially these guys had the long vacation to paint this and got too ambitious and just couldn't finish it. 219 00:23:15,230 --> 00:23:21,780 And Rosetti's partner Elizabeth Siddall was ill at the time in London, 220 00:23:21,780 --> 00:23:28,460 and he eventually just went back and had to look after her and didn't return, which is why, you know, we can see that this is unfinished. 221 00:23:28,460 --> 00:23:39,390 And so this immediately, they only really had a few months to get this huge project done and the cohesive logic behind it fell apart, 222 00:23:39,390 --> 00:23:49,370 which isn't a big deal in and of itself, because it does mean that we get this sort of interesting take on the Arthurian mythos. 223 00:23:49,370 --> 00:23:57,710 So as I said before, you know, Stanhope's Sir Gawain meeting the three ladies at the well and Prinsep's Sir Pelleas leaving the Lady Ettarde 224 00:23:57,710 --> 00:24:02,900 are quite odd because they're not core to the legend. 225 00:24:02,900 --> 00:24:08,840 They're quite secondary and they don't really gel with the rest of the murals. 226 00:24:08,840 --> 00:24:17,390 And as I said, they left them unfinished and you ended up with the father and son duo coming in and doing a little bit of a better job and again, 227 00:24:17,390 --> 00:24:24,410 having a slightly different take on the Arthurian myth. 228 00:24:24,410 --> 00:24:30,030 And I think that one of the most interesting things really is how strange the Pre- 229 00:24:30,030 --> 00:24:36,770 Raphaelites' approaches to the Arthurian myth is and how the knights take a back seat to the women. 230 00:24:36,770 --> 00:24:42,950 There's lots of embracing and lots of flowers and foliage in nature. 231 00:24:42,950 --> 00:24:47,990 You have women at the centre of images with an audience at the side. 232 00:24:47,990 --> 00:24:56,930 And these are in quite stark contrast with the battle and the wedding scenes and stuff which the Rivieres did, which are more of your classic Victoriana. 233 00:24:56,930 --> 00:24:59,690 And there's little consistency either. 234 00:24:59,690 --> 00:25:06,660 So here we can see there's various depictions of Arthur and he's got completely different faces, completely different styles. 235 00:25:06,660 --> 00:25:14,690 And it keeps things interesting. But it's pretty wild in terms of how laissez-faire they were towards the end. 236 00:25:14,690 --> 00:25:17,540 Bearing that they had this coherent plan to begin with. 237 00:25:17,540 --> 00:25:28,670 I think that kind of, you know, metaphorically, it reflects all the different approaches to the myth as well, that I think people took a liking to. 238 00:25:28,670 --> 00:25:33,800 So one of the things as well, you know, I touched on Swinburne being a model, 239 00:25:33,800 --> 00:25:41,330 you've also got Edward Burne-Jones was used as a model for Rossetti's Lancelot. 240 00:25:41,330 --> 00:25:50,300 And there's a really cool picture here where you can see, you know, the sleeping Lancelot and you've got Burne-Jones himself looking exactly the same. 241 00:25:50,300 --> 00:26:00,950 We have Jane Burden as Guinevere and Burden went on to marry William Morris just around the corner from the library, in fact, in St Michael's church. 242 00:26:00,950 --> 00:26:05,630 And, you know, looking at the women in the murals, again, there's so many of them. 243 00:26:05,630 --> 00:26:10,910 I mean, I think there's far more women in these murals than there are men and they're far more prominent. 244 00:26:10,910 --> 00:26:18,230 And there's a real mixture. The Pre-Raphaelites, I should probably say also, they were obsessed with women. 245 00:26:18,230 --> 00:26:22,220 And it's, I think in hindsight, it's almost a little bit creepy. 246 00:26:22,220 --> 00:26:31,700 They were obsessed with calling them stunners, and they went off to sort of have quite incestuous affairs with each others' wives and things. 247 00:26:31,700 --> 00:26:38,480 But they have, you know, they didn't shy away from putting women centre stage and especially in these murals. 248 00:26:38,480 --> 00:26:45,920 And so it's, sort of, the interpretation of the stories is quite unique. 249 00:26:45,920 --> 00:26:54,790 I think, you know, mediaevalism was massively popular at the time, you know it was going through a huge Victorian revival and you know, the Morte 250 00:26:54,790 --> 00:27:00,620 D'Arthur, you know, it's the first time it's been reprinted since, I think 1634. 251 00:27:00,620 --> 00:27:04,550 And, you know, you had Tennyson, who just published The Lady of Shalott, 252 00:27:04,550 --> 00:27:10,010 which is obviously heavily influenced by the Arthurian cycle, so that came out in 1832. 253 00:27:10,010 --> 00:27:17,000 And he then also went on to do Idylls of the King between 1859 and 1885. 254 00:27:17,000 --> 00:27:24,680 And, you know, you got Wagner over in Europe doing Tristan and Isolde, you know, around this period. 255 00:27:24,680 --> 00:27:34,340 So there's a real sort of cultural zeitgeist, I guess, of this renaissance of the Arthurian myth. 256 00:27:34,340 --> 00:27:37,940 And I think it's that, the Pre-Raphaelites, they took this to heart. 257 00:27:37,940 --> 00:27:44,060 You know, we have contemporary accounts of attempting to kind of live the life that they are portraying. 258 00:27:44,060 --> 00:27:50,180 They had a lot of sort of affectations in their speech and mannerisms. They sort of dressed in the style. 259 00:27:50,180 --> 00:27:56,240 Morris had a suit of armour commissioned specifically for the, sort of, the modelling for these murals. 260 00:27:56,240 --> 00:28:04,370 And you can really imagine them sort of going around Oxford, trying to be these sorts of Arthurian knights. 261 00:28:04,370 --> 00:28:07,910 And you can kind of imagine how slightly horrified, I guess, 262 00:28:07,910 --> 00:28:15,200 the establishment of the time might have been seeing these young men going around the place. 263 00:28:15,200 --> 00:28:22,360 But there was this sort of collective crusade, I think, against what they perceived as the ugliness and the materialism, 264 00:28:22,360 --> 00:28:27,290 the mechanical era around them, and they wanted to bring about sort of a new age of chivalry. 265 00:28:27,290 --> 00:28:34,040 And this quest for ideal beauty was the goal here. And I think they've achieved a little bit of that in these murals. 266 00:28:34,040 --> 00:28:44,000 And you can see that they have, they are beautiful and they've really captured something new and quite unique that hadn't really been done before. 267 00:28:44,000 --> 00:28:49,340 And, you know, there aren't any fallen women being rescued by knights. It often seems to be the opposite, in fact. 268 00:28:49,340 --> 00:28:58,250 You know, it's women who are the ones looking after Arthur, you know, ensuring that Excalibur goes back into the lake. 269 00:28:58,250 --> 00:29:03,920 You know, it's Guinevere blocking Lancelot from reaching the Holy Grail because he, frankly, doesn't deserve it. 270 00:29:03,920 --> 00:29:10,130 There's an implication that, you know, even though he loved Guinevere and they had this affair, I think behind that, 271 00:29:10,130 --> 00:29:14,030 there's kind of an implication that it's more that you sin by loving Guinevere 272 00:29:14,030 --> 00:29:18,920 more than God himself in this depiction of not being able to get the Holy Grail, 273 00:29:18,920 --> 00:29:26,540 which is quite a challenge to that traditional chivalric knight and that sort of perfect Victorian gentleman as well. 274 00:29:26,540 --> 00:29:33,380 You know, we saw Nimue casting Merlin into the into the well, which is a really sort of powerful image. 275 00:29:33,380 --> 00:29:40,820 So, you know, it's, sex and sin, I think, seem to be a lot of the topics behind all this, rather than, 276 00:29:40,820 --> 00:29:50,540 you know, allegiance to the king, country, and chivalry. And it's not just, you know, nowadays, we'd see that as a big part of Victoriana, 277 00:29:50,540 --> 00:29:55,980 but maybe at the time it wasn't so obvious that sex and sin were at the forefront. 278 00:29:55,980 --> 00:30:03,270 And so it's – I don't know if you've got anything to add to that, Caroline, before I sort of wrap up? 279 00:30:03,270 --> 00:30:07,020 This is incredibly interesting to hear, 280 00:30:07,020 --> 00:30:14,670 because it's so clear from your discussion of these murals how interested they are in these sort of romantic, 281 00:30:14,670 --> 00:30:19,170 sexual and sinful aspects of the Arthurian story. 282 00:30:19,170 --> 00:30:27,630 And what's so fascinating is the way that, sort of, authors who end up inspired by this aesthetic pick and choose the bits that they want. 283 00:30:27,630 --> 00:30:38,430 Tolkien has famously very few women in Middle-earth, and he sort of lifted so much of these kind of mediaeval aesthetics from the Pre-Raphaelites. 284 00:30:38,430 --> 00:30:41,040 He was so profoundly inspired by William Morris, 285 00:30:41,040 --> 00:30:50,430 but he's sort of completely circumvented their interest in the femme fatale to to think about their interest in nature, 286 00:30:50,430 --> 00:31:00,900 a sort of rebellion against industrialisation, right? This kind of allergy to everything that feels mechanical, industrial, or modern. 287 00:31:00,900 --> 00:31:11,940 And it's very interesting to sort of consider how they've approached these stories with such different angles, but with similar values. 288 00:31:11,940 --> 00:31:19,770 Absolutely. I mean, you can see, you know, there's a proto-Middle-earth kind of emerging here, you know, 289 00:31:19,770 --> 00:31:24,870 you have all these fantastical sort of forest backdrops and lakes and this amazing scenery. 290 00:31:24,870 --> 00:31:29,550 And you can really see that, you know, that would have rubbed off on Tolkien. 291 00:31:29,550 --> 00:31:36,000 Certainly it's, you know, he probably would have seen these when they were looking at their best as well. 292 00:31:36,000 --> 00:31:42,270 So it's, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of – not even, I suppose I would say intertexuality, going on there. 293 00:31:42,270 --> 00:31:47,100 I don't even know how you'd phrase it when it comes to things like that. 294 00:31:47,100 --> 00:31:51,100 But I mean, you know, it was a lifelong passion for Morris and Rossetti. 295 00:31:51,100 --> 00:32:02,130 And that idea of Arthuriana, Rossetti himself was, you know, he tried to live like these knights and he himself was something of an Arthur figure. 296 00:32:02,130 --> 00:32:07,050 He's a natural leader. And you've had a ton of gathering people around him. 297 00:32:07,050 --> 00:32:10,740 He was flawed. He didn't actually finish a lot of his work, but what he did 298 00:32:10,740 --> 00:32:18,480 produce was brilliant. And, of course, the idea of, this idea of beauty and pushing back against industrialisation, 299 00:32:18,480 --> 00:32:21,450 you know, Morris is one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement. 300 00:32:21,450 --> 00:32:29,250 And that's pretty much their whole ethos really, it's, you know, beauty and utility being together. 301 00:32:29,250 --> 00:32:39,480 So, I mean, there's the Pre-Raphaelites and, you know, the wider Victorian things. Arthur proved to be a huge inspiration for all of them. 302 00:32:39,480 --> 00:32:45,750 And later work, you know, things like Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott in the boat, 303 00:32:45,750 --> 00:32:56,100 Holman Hunt also did another Lady of Shalott; Rossetti, you know, was obsessed with the sort of the Holy Grail and painted numerous different depictions of it. 304 00:32:56,100 --> 00:33:04,050 And Burne-Jones never really escaped that sort of Arthurian world, like, you see in a lot of his paintings that he, you know, 305 00:33:04,050 --> 00:33:07,650 he was fixated on all this stuff. And it's a real theme throughout his life. 306 00:33:07,650 --> 00:33:16,560 And one thing I found interesting in actually doing some of my research on this, which admittedly wasn't a deep dive, 307 00:33:16,560 --> 00:33:22,930 but it's, one thing did stand out to me was a lot of the information we have actually, 308 00:33:22,930 --> 00:33:28,530 you know, as to when these murals were produced and the process behind that, 309 00:33:28,530 --> 00:33:36,280 a lot of this information comes from Lady Burne-Jones. So Edward Burne-Jones' wife. I thought was really sort of a nice way to finish things off. 310 00:33:36,280 --> 00:33:44,010 It was her records, I think, that really enabled us to look back and actually glean more information out of this. 311 00:33:44,010 --> 00:33:48,750 I mean, obviously, the Pre-Raphs kept their own records and some of them got destroyed over time. 312 00:33:48,750 --> 00:33:55,770 And for them, it was a bit of a laugh, really. It's just one summer of taking this huge project and going away. 313 00:33:55,770 --> 00:34:02,040 But as Lady Burne-Jones, who kept all the actual in-depth diary entries and sort of recalled fondly about that 314 00:34:02,040 --> 00:34:06,930 time and gave a different perspective on these guys who are working on this. 315 00:34:06,930 --> 00:34:12,540 So I think we have a lot to her really in terms of unpicking the history behind all this. 316 00:34:12,540 --> 00:34:19,120 And so, I mean, that's kind of my my overview of the murals. 317 00:34:19,120 --> 00:34:23,670 I don't know if you've got any questions or if there's anything you sort of like to add to that? 318 00:34:23,670 --> 00:34:28,530 Yeah, I mean, that was a wonderfully thorough and exciting discussion. 319 00:34:28,530 --> 00:34:38,400 Thank you. I suppose just sort of as a general question, do we want to kind of hazard a guess as to what Arthuriana meant to these artists? 320 00:34:38,400 --> 00:34:46,090 Why? Why, when given the opportunity this is where they went. 321 00:34:46,090 --> 00:34:54,970 It's a tricky one. I think we kind of touched on it in a couple of points in this talk, but it is that sort of the idealism, I think. 322 00:34:54,970 --> 00:35:05,500 I think there's also an element of, you know, these were quintessentially you know, it wasn't an international movement by any means. 323 00:35:05,500 --> 00:35:10,600 It's a very English approach, you know, specifically English. 324 00:35:10,600 --> 00:35:16,750 You know, the Welsh have their own versions of all this stuff and so do the Scottish and the Irish. 325 00:35:16,750 --> 00:35:20,650 But Arthur itself was a very sort of English concept. 326 00:35:20,650 --> 00:35:25,030 And the Pre-Raphs were pretty, pretty English guys by all accounts. 327 00:35:25,030 --> 00:35:32,650 And so I think it is that sort of sense of identity or trying to sort of call on the national, sort 328 00:35:32,650 --> 00:35:39,400 of, collective consciousness and sort of bring something back that they felt was missing in society. 329 00:35:39,400 --> 00:35:43,690 Obviously, I can't really speak for them definitively or anything like that. 330 00:35:43,690 --> 00:35:50,590 But I think, you know, it does make sense given their ethos of sort of trying to find beauty in things and sort of the age of chivalry. 331 00:35:50,590 --> 00:35:58,030 And then you have this ready made figure and presumably they knew enough about the myths to 332 00:35:58,030 --> 00:36:01,360 not actually have to do too much research behind this. 333 00:36:01,360 --> 00:36:06,550 And it kind of fitted in with their schedule of, you know, they just had a few months to get it done. 334 00:36:06,550 --> 00:36:11,220 So, yeah, it's it's a tricky one to answer. 335 00:36:11,220 --> 00:36:15,020 And I don't think there is a solid answer. I think we kind of touched on a few aspects. 336 00:36:15,020 --> 00:36:22,110 I don't think there's any sort of if you got a different take on that or if there's any different approaches. 337 00:36:22,110 --> 00:36:28,360 You know, I think that sounds very sort of intuitively right to me in terms of the context of the period. 338 00:36:28,360 --> 00:36:37,250 Right. And if you're looking for, if you're looking to, move away from 339 00:36:37,250 --> 00:36:45,380 the anxieties and pressures of a rapidly changing modern world, and you're looking to sort of move back into the past to be 'pre-Raphaelite', 340 00:36:45,380 --> 00:36:49,400 to sort of reverse time in your art, the first place you're going to look, 341 00:36:49,400 --> 00:36:54,940 you're going to hunt for the mythology of the place that you are most invested in. 342 00:36:54,940 --> 00:37:01,040 Right. And there were all these sort of nationalist movements at the time where there was this big focus on national identity, 343 00:37:01,040 --> 00:37:05,900 the discovery of folklore as as a kind of academic discipline. 344 00:37:05,900 --> 00:37:17,120 There's sort of an instinct for good or for ill to think back to what is the sort of nearest magic in the place that I'm in. 345 00:37:17,120 --> 00:37:24,830 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, I mean, the other thing to kind of bear in mind is that there's nothing, I mean, 346 00:37:24,830 --> 00:37:29,360 this is obvious to me because I, you know, I work here and spend a lot of my time in these buildings. 347 00:37:29,360 --> 00:37:38,720 There's nothing else in the buildings like this. And there's never any specific Arthurian link to the Oxford Union whatsoever. 348 00:37:38,720 --> 00:37:42,610 This is very much the Pre-Raphaelites, I feel like, just doing their own thing. 349 00:37:42,610 --> 00:37:51,020 And quite unusually for the Oxford Union, they just went along with it and said, yeah, you can you can go for it, guys, go wild. 350 00:37:51,020 --> 00:37:55,940 And yeah, it's fantastic what they managed to produce. It's totally unique. 351 00:37:55,940 --> 00:38:01,980 It's really an amazing space to be in. You often forget just how beautiful it can be. 352 00:38:01,980 --> 00:38:08,330 And so this is sort of an otherworldly space in the context of the Union Buildings. 353 00:38:08,330 --> 00:38:13,950 Yep. Yep, absolutely. Pure escapism, I think. 354 00:38:13,950 --> 00:38:24,600 So they've kind of constructed their own mediaeval hall with the wall paintings sort of serving the function of tapestries, even. 355 00:38:24,600 --> 00:38:30,750 Yes, absolutely. And it's the original configuration. I mean, you can see in this slide here that the room is just full of books, 356 00:38:30,750 --> 00:38:35,080 but that ground floor would have been they would have been open space for debating. 357 00:38:35,080 --> 00:38:39,630 So you would have just had great big tables and benches making it feel all the more mediaeval, 358 00:38:39,630 --> 00:38:45,720 really. Yeah. So it would have been well, I mean, it still is a fantastic space and yeah. 359 00:38:45,720 --> 00:38:51,690 A complete escape as all libraries should be, I think. Yes, I agree. 360 00:38:51,690 --> 00:38:55,440 Well that seems like it might be as good a note as any to end on. 361 00:38:55,440 --> 00:39:00,990 Is there anything else that you think our audiences ought to know about these murals, 362 00:39:00,990 --> 00:39:07,770 about the Union Library, about it as a space? Nothing in particular. 363 00:39:07,770 --> 00:39:13,290 Obviously, I'd encourage everyone to join. I have to say that, so you can make use of the space. 364 00:39:13,290 --> 00:39:20,400 But it is also worth noting that, you know, if people would like to come and visit the library, you don't have to be a member of the Union itself. 365 00:39:20,400 --> 00:39:25,080 You can just get in touch with the library team and we'll happily show people around as well. 366 00:39:25,080 --> 00:39:30,300 We love showing this space off. As you can see, it's just it's a pretty magical place. 367 00:39:30,300 --> 00:39:33,660 So, yeah, I mean, I'd say thank you for having me and thank you. 368 00:39:33,660 --> 00:39:38,910 Thank you for your time as well. Thank you so much for your time. This was wonderful. I feel like I've learnt a lot. 369 00:39:38,910 --> 00:39:44,130 I think our audiences have as well. And we're very grateful for your expertise. 370 00:39:44,130 --> 00:39:44,981 Thank you.