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.
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.
Thank you for being here, Tom. Thank you for having me, Caroline.
It's a real pleasure to talk about the murals in an online context where
hopefully lots of people get to see and learn a little bit more about the place.
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.
OK, so the murals were painted between 1857 and 1859 by a group of guys called – well, who call themselves Pre-Raphaelites.
And the murals themselves are located in the Oxford Union Society, which is a student debating society in the centre of Oxford.
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.
So the Pre-Raphaelites themselves were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was an artist; you had Valentine
Prinsep, who was also an artist. John Hungerford Pollen, who was a fellow of Merton.
You had William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. They're both undergraduates of Exeter College.
And they also went on to become successful artists in their own right. Roddam Spencer Stanhope,
who was at Christchurch; Arthur Hughes, who was also another artist. And then you had William and Briton Riviere,
who are professional artists who came in and sort of finished the job, which we'll talk about a bit later.
Morris and Burne-Jones were kind of the bigger names, as well as Rossetti.
They came into contact with Rossetti, who was already well-established artist by this point.
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.
So with the exception of William and Briton Riviere,
these guys will basically form the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelite movement; there had been a first wave a few years prior,
which kind of lost momentum. And this, this project really kick-started the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
Oh, I didn't actually know that, that the murals united the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
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.
Good luck with that. And luckily, luckily, things turned out quite well.
But yeah. So this is definitely sort of a catalyst for that second wave of the Pre-Raphs.
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,
he was meant to paint Newton gathering pebbles on the shores of the Ocean of Truth.
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,
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.
So Rossetti came over and had a look and said, yes, this is this is kind of the one for me, really.
This is what I'd like to really sort of do to make my mark on the, on the scene.
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.
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.
So it's very unique shape. I think that Rossetti must have seen it and gone Aha,
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
and they just lend themselves, the space lends itself really well to sort of showing the depictions of the Arthurian
myth. However, you know, these guys are relatively inexperienced in terms of sort of doing large scale projects like this.
Whilst Rossetti had a background in painting, he didn't really have a background in painting on buildings or fresco style.
And his, the rest of the cohort certainly didn't.
Some of them were still undergraduates at this stage and some of them had only ever sort of painted on canvas, really.
So we can see here, this is Rosetti's sort of a depiction of Sir Lancelot's vision of the Holy Grail.
Down here on the bottom right is a sleeping Lancelot.
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.
And what I've done actually in the other sort of panel in the bottom right is highlighted the brickwork that's
coming through and give you an idea of how little they actually prepared the surface of this, and how remarkable it is that
we still actually have these surviving on our walls some hundred and fifty years later.
The actual the physical aspect of the painting is, they did very little groundwork
in preparing the actual site because the building was so new it hadn't fully dried out.
So what ended up happening was the the minerals from the brickwork actually seeped through
the paint because it was pretty much bare paints that they put straight onto the walls.
They didn't lay out a plaster or anything. So it's it's not technically a fresco.
I think it's a form of distemper was what they actually used.
The contemporary accounts tell us that these were really, really vibrant murals when they were first finished.
And the sort of the heavy influence was, you know, mediaeval illuminated manuscripts.
And according to contemporary accounts, you know, they very much resemble these.
And apparently they really sort of, the colour really popped off of the wall.
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
this sort of deterioration here, which is the death of Arthur. So I don't know if you can see my cursor here,
but you can see in the centre you've got Arthur having defeated his nemesis, Mordred, in the final battle.
He himself was gravely wounded. And here you have him casting Excalibur back into the lake.
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.
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.
But we'll come back to this as as we sort of make our way through.
And right, so one of your questions was explaining a little bit about who the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were,
and what were their guiding, artistic principles. So, here we've got a lovely shot of the Rossetti mural as well,
putting it in a bit more context. As I said, this was the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelites.
So the first wave of William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Rossetti himself, and a couple of others.
And they started in 1848. The second wave included Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris and more.
And these ones, sort of ended up painting in the library.
These murals represent probably the most important collaboration between the Pre-Raphaelite artists.
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.
And also, these are the largest paintings ever done by the sort of collective. The Pre-Raphaelites themselves,
they were mainly concerned with producing what they perceived as sort of ideal beauty; so, abundant details,
lots of intense colours, quite complex compositions.
There's a heavy emphasis on sort of nature and pastoral imagery, as well as sort of mediaeval mythology.
The term 'Pre-Raphaelite' itself comes from the fact that they believe that art produced
after Raphael in the 15th century had become sort of too mechanistic and academic.
And it became dominated by the establishment and the Royal Academy of Arts,
especially for these guys in that period, the Royal Academy of Arts really comes to dominate the cultural scene.
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.
And that really ties in with Morris's later work as well, which I'll probably touch on further in this talk.
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
is that their sort of interest in the mediaeval,
really inspired writers like Lewis and Tolkien in their approach to the mediaeval and their sort of idealisation of the mediaeval.
And so sword and sorcery fantasy in a way, bears the hallmarks of the Pre-Raphaelite obsession with Arturiana,
because it's this this is why we have sword and sorcery, right,
rather than all of our fantasy being set in ancient Rome or whatever.
The sort of pseudo-mediaeval atmosphere of fantasy owes a lot to this movement.
Yes, absolutely. Let's let's take a deep dive into showing you some of those swords.
So the Oxford murals are basically based around Malory's Morte D'Arthur and that depiction of the Arthurian myth.
So here we can see John Hungerford Pollen's depiction of Arthur receiving his sword, Excalibur, from the Lady of the Lake.
There's a fantastic thing in the background, just a real menagerie of animals.
So there's quite a lot of artistic licence here.
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.
Legend has it just beneath that,
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,
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,
you got the arm coming up, you got the big massive sword and you've got Arthur stooping down to collect it.
I mean, it's this iconic part of the whole mythos.
So this is William and Briton Riviere's panel, we don't know which one actually painted it,
they were a father and son team and these guys actually came in because the Pre-Raphs didn't finish all the panels.
So these, this father and son were professional artists, and they actually did
know what they were doing and prepared the surface just a little bit better,
which is why these are more vibrant and there's a couple of other panels by them that we'll see as well.
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.
Instead, they sort of worked with more a Victorian stereotypical view of the Arthurian myths, which is just, you know, battles essentially.
So this is this is one of the few things where there's actually a big sword fight because, you know,
they assumed that people love seeing sword fights, and which the Pre-Raphs themselves had a slightly different take on.
So this is very early William Morris, probably one of his early, earliest surviving paintings,
and you can just see at the top there that that is the ceiling, which is the quintessential William Morris print.
And that's very much contrasted with what we're actually seeing here.
So this is his depiction of Tristram and La Belle Iseult, which I probably butchered saying, but it's a classic tale.
And Sir Tristram himself has actually just had a duel with Sir Palamides,
who you can see on the bottom left, over the the affections of Iseult and it's tricky to make out,
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.
And it's a lot of detail there. And those sunflowers and the forest imagery and things.
Interestingly, it's believed that Sir Tristram in the top right there is actually based on Algernon Charles Swinburne because he
was a friend of theirs and he was certainly around at the time and had come to see the murals being painted,
although he didn't actually really want anything to do with them. But I think they added him in as a model.
So that's a nice little bit there. Here we have Edward Burne-Jones and we have the death of Merlin,
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,
the lack of kind of consistency here between the artists.
There was a grand overall plan,
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.
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.
She's sometimes depicted as the Lady of the Lake and she's sometimes seen as an independent character as well.
But feel free to step in, Caroline, if that's slightly mixed up.
But from what I can tell, that's that's what's happening there.
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,
there's actually and it's quite difficult to make out here as a big stone on a chain. Now, according to this myth,
Merlin essentially pursues Nimue and after a while she gets sick of him and ends
up basically banishing him under a rock is the official sort of narrative.
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.
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,
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,
which I think is great. So that's kind of what's happening here.
I mean, it's fantastic detail on Merlin's sleeves.
And we actually have some infrared photography done a while back and the details that came out that were great.
My favourite part is on the horizon. At the top is a nice golden sheen and it's just really beautiful.
And you can imagine how, again, this must have looked like an illuminated manuscript when it was first done.
Yeah, it's very interesting also about the Merlin story is that often iterations of that story say
that Nimue traps Merlin in a crystal cave, and we've gone in a very different direction here,
sort of darker, more personal, less romantic in a way.
Yeah, absolutely. And when I was doing some reading around on this topic, I couldn't find any other depictions of a well, specifically.
So I'll be very interested to see where Burne-Jones got the inspiration for that from. A little claustrophobic, isn't it?
Yes. Yes. And it sounds like he deserved it as well.
And so this is another sort of slightly odd one, really.
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,
is where things start getting slightly off-piste from the traditional Arthurian myth because it's not a really well known scene,
this. This is very much a sort of, you know – Sir Gawain,
his reward for doing a quest is getting to choose a damsel, which is quite, quite problematic in this day and age.
And it's very much a side quest, really.
It's not what you think of when you think of the Arthurian myth.
So you have three ladies here, and you have the 60 year old, a 30 year old, and you have a 15 year old.
And you can probably guess by the sort of composition of this, which is which.
And and obviously, Gawain ends up sort of choosing the 15 year old and,
whatever that entails, but you can see here that the competition is really interesting because Gawain is very
much a side figure here and this ties into, sort of, the Pre-Raphaelites are obsessed with this,
you know, this idea of the ideal beauty. And, you know, they place this this beauty right,
right at the forefront of the image.
And once you get your eye in, you can see that there's really spectacular and really detailed foliage in the background.
But it's all overshadowed by this, you know, this beautiful lady who's depicted and again,
the knight, and you can just make out his sword there, he's not the centre of this.
It's not that sort of chivalric ideal of having a big guy with a sword just taking centre stage.
He's been, you know, literally pushed off to the side. This is quite interesting, I think.
And so, you know, back to the death of Arthur.
He's about to go off on a dusky barge to Avalon, I think,
and you can see Sir Bedivere on the left hand side casting
Excalibur back into the lake, and you can see the wonderful glowing arm there.
It's a slightly confusing composition because it looks like one of the central,
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.
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
when he gets the sword from the Lady of the Lake in the first instance.
So there was a plan to have these murals facing each other and telling some sort of coherent narrative.
And we know this from contemporary letters and accounts, but that fell by the wayside very quickly.
And as we saw, they kind of ended up putting in depictions of side quests and weddings and battles.
And so here we've got the education of Merlin. Again, this is William and Briton Riviere.
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.
And this is a far more Victorian, classic perception of the story.
You've got Merlin with a big beard and his big staff and Arthur gazing up adoringly.
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.
And it's never really explained what he's doing there.
So whether that's previous work coming through or whether it's meant to mean something else, who knows?
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.
And so that's quite an irony here in that people come to the Union to see the Pre-Raphaelite murals,
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
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.
He liked to paint and get paid for it, whereas the Pre-Raphaelites, part of their whole sort of chivalric code, I guess,
was doing art for the love of art, and they could afford to do that sort of stuff without necessarily being paid.
So, again, there's a lot of symbolism here.
It's a bad omen, apparently, to have a white stag charging through your wedding, which sounds like a terrible thing to happen,
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.
And one thing to note is that the perspective is all slightly off here as well.
And we think it was Briton who did this because he was the son of the duo.
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.
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.
So this is kind of the centrepiece of it all, really. This is the sort of the most fantastic image.
And there's lots of symbolism going on here.
So you have the the serpent on Lancelot's shield and obviously conjuring up images of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
And I think there's a lot of, sort of, similarities between sort of biblical imagery and so that Christ-like
figure of Arthur and his apostles or his Knights of the Round Table, disciples,
a lot of commingling there in terms of imagery and storytelling.
But I think at this point,
it's Lancelot's own sin that prevents him from actually getting through to the Holy Grail on the left hand side here,
because, you know, him and Guinevere had an affair, essentially.
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.
So Guinevere's still centre stage, still standing up tall, slight imagery of Christ on the cross there, in that sort of stance.
But it's Lancelot himself who's actually the one who is down there in the dirt.
And that's really unusual, I think, for,
as we keep saying, for Victorian depictions of Arthur.
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.
The Pre-Raphaelites did love a femme fatale, didn't they?
Absolutely. Yes. And so, I mean, it's an interesting selection of scenes, really.
And I think Rossetti basically had, you know, as I mentioned,
he conceived the paintings as pairs of sort of complementary subjects, revolving around getting the sword and then having to give the sword back.
And it didn't really work.
And there's a practical reason why it didn't work as well,
because essentially these guys had the long vacation to paint this and got too ambitious and just couldn't finish it.
And Rosetti's partner Elizabeth Siddall was ill at the time in London,
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.
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,
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.
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
are quite odd because they're not core to the legend.
They're quite secondary and they don't really gel with the rest of the murals.
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,
having a slightly different take on the Arthurian myth.
And I think that one of the most interesting things really is how strange the Pre-
Raphaelites' approaches to the Arthurian myth is and how the knights take a back seat to the women.
There's lots of embracing and lots of flowers and foliage in nature.
You have women at the centre of images with an audience at the side.
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.
And there's little consistency either.
So here we can see there's various depictions of Arthur and he's got completely different faces, completely different styles.
And it keeps things interesting. But it's pretty wild in terms of how laissez-faire they were towards the end.
Bearing that they had this coherent plan to begin with.
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.
So one of the things as well, you know, I touched on Swinburne being a model,
you've also got Edward Burne-Jones was used as a model for Rossetti's Lancelot.
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.
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.
And, you know, looking at the women in the murals, again, there's so many of them.
I mean, I think there's far more women in these murals than there are men and they're far more prominent.
And there's a real mixture. The Pre-Raphaelites, I should probably say also, they were obsessed with women.
And it's, I think in hindsight, it's almost a little bit creepy.
They were obsessed with calling them stunners, and they went off to sort of have quite incestuous affairs with each others' wives and things.
But they have, you know, they didn't shy away from putting women centre stage and especially in these murals.
And so it's, sort of, the interpretation of the stories is quite unique.
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
D'Arthur, you know, it's the first time it's been reprinted since, I think 1634.
And, you know, you had Tennyson, who just published The Lady of Shalott,
which is obviously heavily influenced by the Arthurian cycle, so that came out in 1832.
And he then also went on to do Idylls of the King between 1859 and 1885.
And, you know, you got Wagner over in Europe doing Tristan and Isolde, you know, around this period.
So there's a real sort of cultural zeitgeist, I guess, of this renaissance of the Arthurian myth.
And I think it's that, the Pre-Raphaelites, they took this to heart.
You know, we have contemporary accounts of attempting to kind of live the life that they are portraying.
They had a lot of sort of affectations in their speech and mannerisms. They sort of dressed in the style.
Morris had a suit of armour commissioned specifically for the, sort of, the modelling for these murals.
And you can really imagine them sort of going around Oxford, trying to be these sorts of Arthurian knights.
And you can kind of imagine how slightly horrified, I guess,
the establishment of the time might have been seeing these young men going around the place.
But there was this sort of collective crusade, I think, against what they perceived as the ugliness and the materialism,
the mechanical era around them, and they wanted to bring about sort of a new age of chivalry.
And this quest for ideal beauty was the goal here. And I think they've achieved a little bit of that in these murals.
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.
And, you know, there aren't any fallen women being rescued by knights. It often seems to be the opposite, in fact.
You know, it's women who are the ones looking after Arthur, you know, ensuring that Excalibur goes back into the lake.
You know, it's Guinevere blocking Lancelot from reaching the Holy Grail because he, frankly, doesn't deserve it.
There's an implication that, you know, even though he loved Guinevere and they had this affair, I think behind that,
there's kind of an implication that it's more that you sin by loving Guinevere
more than God himself in this depiction of not being able to get the Holy Grail,
which is quite a challenge to that traditional chivalric knight and that sort of perfect Victorian gentleman as well.
You know, we saw Nimue casting Merlin into the into the well, which is a really sort of powerful image.
So, you know, it's, sex and sin, I think, seem to be a lot of the topics behind all this, rather than,
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,
but maybe at the time it wasn't so obvious that sex and sin were at the forefront.
And so it's – I don't know if you've got anything to add to that, Caroline, before I sort of wrap up?
This is incredibly interesting to hear,
because it's so clear from your discussion of these murals how interested they are in these sort of romantic,
sexual and sinful aspects of the Arthurian story.
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.
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.
He was so profoundly inspired by William Morris,
but he's sort of completely circumvented their interest in the femme fatale to to think about their interest in nature,
a sort of rebellion against industrialisation, right? This kind of allergy to everything that feels mechanical, industrial, or modern.
And it's very interesting to sort of consider how they've approached these stories with such different angles, but with similar values.
Absolutely. I mean, you can see, you know, there's a proto-Middle-earth kind of emerging here, you know,
you have all these fantastical sort of forest backdrops and lakes and this amazing scenery.
And you can really see that, you know, that would have rubbed off on Tolkien.
Certainly it's, you know, he probably would have seen these when they were looking at their best as well.
So it's, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of – not even, I suppose I would say intertexuality, going on there.
I don't even know how you'd phrase it when it comes to things like that.
But I mean, you know, it was a lifelong passion for Morris and Rossetti.
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.
He's a natural leader. And you've had a ton of gathering people around him.
He was flawed. He didn't actually finish a lot of his work, but what he did
produce was brilliant. And, of course, the idea of, this idea of beauty and pushing back against industrialisation,
you know, Morris is one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement.
And that's pretty much their whole ethos really, it's, you know, beauty and utility being together.
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.
And later work, you know, things like Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott in the boat,
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.
And Burne-Jones never really escaped that sort of Arthurian world, like, you see in a lot of his paintings that he, you know,
he was fixated on all this stuff. And it's a real theme throughout his life.
And one thing I found interesting in actually doing some of my research on this, which admittedly wasn't a deep dive,
but it's, one thing did stand out to me was a lot of the information we have actually,
you know, as to when these murals were produced and the process behind that,
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.
It was her records, I think, that really enabled us to look back and actually glean more information out of this.
I mean, obviously, the Pre-Raphs kept their own records and some of them got destroyed over time.
And for them, it was a bit of a laugh, really. It's just one summer of taking this huge project and going away.
But as Lady Burne-Jones, who kept all the actual in-depth diary entries and sort of recalled fondly about that
time and gave a different perspective on these guys who are working on this.
So I think we have a lot to her really in terms of unpicking the history behind all this.
And so, I mean, that's kind of my my overview of the murals.
I don't know if you've got any questions or if there's anything you sort of like to add to that?
Yeah, I mean, that was a wonderfully thorough and exciting discussion.
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?
Why? Why, when given the opportunity this is where they went.
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.
I think there's also an element of, you know, these were quintessentially you know, it wasn't an international movement by any means.
It's a very English approach, you know, specifically English.
You know, the Welsh have their own versions of all this stuff and so do the Scottish and the Irish.
But Arthur itself was a very sort of English concept.
And the Pre-Raphs were pretty, pretty English guys by all accounts.
And so I think it is that sort of sense of identity or trying to sort of call on the national, sort
of, collective consciousness and sort of bring something back that they felt was missing in society.
Obviously, I can't really speak for them definitively or anything like that.
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.
And then you have this ready made figure and presumably they knew enough about the myths to
not actually have to do too much research behind this.
And it kind of fitted in with their schedule of, you know, they just had a few months to get it done.
So, yeah, it's it's a tricky one to answer.
And I don't think there is a solid answer. I think we kind of touched on a few aspects.
I don't think there's any sort of if you got a different take on that or if there's any different approaches.
You know, I think that sounds very sort of intuitively right to me in terms of the context of the period.
Right. And if you're looking for, if you're looking to, move away from
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',
to sort of reverse time in your art, the first place you're going to look,
you're going to hunt for the mythology of the place that you are most invested in.
Right. And there were all these sort of nationalist movements at the time where there was this big focus on national identity,
the discovery of folklore as as a kind of academic discipline.
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.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, I mean, the other thing to kind of bear in mind is that there's nothing, I mean,
this is obvious to me because I, you know, I work here and spend a lot of my time in these buildings.
There's nothing else in the buildings like this. And there's never any specific Arthurian link to the Oxford Union whatsoever.
This is very much the Pre-Raphaelites, I feel like, just doing their own thing.
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.
And yeah, it's fantastic what they managed to produce. It's totally unique.
It's really an amazing space to be in. You often forget just how beautiful it can be.
And so this is sort of an otherworldly space in the context of the Union Buildings.
Yep. Yep, absolutely. Pure escapism, I think.
So they've kind of constructed their own mediaeval hall with the wall paintings sort of serving the function of tapestries, even.
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,
but that ground floor would have been they would have been open space for debating.
So you would have just had great big tables and benches making it feel all the more mediaeval,
really. Yeah. So it would have been well, I mean, it still is a fantastic space and yeah.
A complete escape as all libraries should be, I think. Yes, I agree.
Well that seems like it might be as good a note as any to end on.
Is there anything else that you think our audiences ought to know about these murals,
about the Union Library, about it as a space? Nothing in particular.
Obviously, I'd encourage everyone to join. I have to say that, so you can make use of the space.
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.
You can just get in touch with the library team and we'll happily show people around as well.
We love showing this space off. As you can see, it's just it's a pretty magical place.
So, yeah, I mean, I'd say thank you for having me and thank you.
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.
I think our audiences have as well. And we're very grateful for your expertise.
Thank you.