Exhibitions
Huon Mallalieu
The Ashmolean boasts one of the most important collections of Pre-raphaelite works, largely thanks to a remarkable husband and wife.
Thomas Combe (1797-1872) was the son of a printer, bookseller and newspaper-owner in Leicester, after whose death he moved to Oxford and joined the University’s Clarendon Press. He became its senior share-holding director at a time when the Press was making a fortune from printing Bibles – so much so that he successfully gambled his own money in founding the Wolvercote paper mill to satisfy the demand.
His timing was lucky, because later the profitability of the Press was seriously hit by the insistence of the British and Foreign Bible Society on ever cheaper editions.
In 1840, he married Martha Bennett (1806-93), daughter of a local ironmonger, the ceremony performed by the future Cardinal Newman. In The Pre-raphaelite Tragedy, William Gaunt wrote, ‘Oxford was a university with Pre-raphaelite possibilities. Its architecture, its learning, even its sense of humour, medieval and Victorian, were a product of the Middle Ages. Its spires dreamed. At the same time it was full of ardent youth.’
Just as important were several older figures, including the Combes and James Wyatt, the carver and picture-dealer, who were among Holman Hunt’s and Millais’s earliest patrons. Thomas Combe was also a notable philanthropist. Among the projects he funded was the building of the imposing St Barnabas in Oxford’s Jericho, where the newly ordained Charles Dodgson preached his first sermon.
After Thomas’s death, Martha continued to collect, and it was her bequest that formed the basis of the Ashmolean’s Pre-raphaelite collection.
The original Brotherhood lasted barely five years from the end of 1848. The establishment’s initial antagonism to it was short-lived; within a decade, the style had swept all before it. A second generation – Morris, Burne-jones, Madox Brown, Inchbold, Spartali Stillman, the Liverpool painters and many more – replaced the original Brothers who had gone their own ways.
The display of watercolours and drawings at the Ashmolean has fine things by both of these generations, including the original pastel version of Rossetti’s Day Dream, Millais’s portrait of Holman Hunt and, most fittingly, Hunt’s of Thomas Combe. One wonders whether Hunt’s stupendous beard in later life was inspired by that flaunted by Combe.
The Pre-raphaelites’ other great champion, Ruskin, was inextricably tied to Oxford. He is represented here by a delicious gouache study of a velvet crab.