ROYAL HOLLOWAY COLLEGE PICTURE GALLERY
When Thomas Holloway was building his magnificent Holloway College in Englefield Green, he also acquired two collections of paintings. One was for his house, Tittenhurst Park in Sunninghill and the other for the College. The collection for his house, containing mostly Old Masters, he bequeathed to his sister-in-law, Mary Ann Driver. After his death in 1883 (his wife Jane had died in 1875) the majority of this collection was sold at auction by Mrs Driver.
Holloway’s second collection for his women’s college were modern paintings. Apart from the 3 paintings sold by the college in the 80s (see below) the collection remains the same.
When Holloway started to purchase paintings for the College he was 81 and too frail to travel to auctions, so his brother-in-law, George Martin (later George Martin Holloway) acted as his agent. However it is widely accepted that he chose all the paintings in advance from auctioneers’ catalogues. Some of them were by already famous artists, others showed what life was like for the poor in society, some he simply liked. The collection merited a viewing by Queen Victoria in 1886. Between May 1881 and June 1883 he acquired 77 paintings, spending a total of £83,304. 8. 0 (causing the Times to report that “an amateur buyer with apparently unlimited means…has created no small excitement”). The paintings were hung in what was originally designed by W H Crossland, the architect, as a recreation hall, but later became the picture gallery, 100 feet long and 30 feet wide..
Since the pictures were hung in the Picture Gallery there have only been 2 occasions when the whole collection has been removed. The first was in November –December 1981, when some were exhibited in London in aid of the Victorian society and the rest were put in storage while the Picture Gallery was being redecorated. The second occasion was from October 2008 – January 2011 when they went on a very successful tour of Museums and Art Galleries in 8 cities in America and Canada. They were exhibited under the title “Paintings from the Reign of Victoria: The Royal Holloway Collection, London”. They have now been restored to the Picture Gallery.
The paintings are representative of subjects popular in the early 1880s. Two created salesroom records. They are the “Babylonian Marriage Market” by Edwin Longsden and “Man Proposes, God Disposes” painted by Edwin Landseer in 1864. This picture is based on the expedition led by Sir John Franklin in the 1840s, which attempted to locate the North-West passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean across the Pole. None of the explorers survived. Because of its rather disturbing content (two polar bears ravaging the remains of the expedition) this picture is covered with a Union Jack when the Picture Gallery is being used as an examination hall.
Other paintings which attract a great deal of interest from visitors are two by John Everett Millais ‘The Princes in the Tower’ and ‘Princess Elizabeth in Prison at St James’, 1878 and 1879, Luke Fildes’ ‘Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward’, 1874, Edwin Longsden Long’s ‘The Babylonian Marriage Market’, 1875, and, perhaps the most famous, William Powell Frith’s ‘The Railway Station’, 1862. This was a bargain at £2000 as a previous purchaser had paid £16,300 for it.
The collection also includes portraits of Thomas Holloway and his wife Jane (hanging outside the Gallery), painted in 1845 by William Scott.
In the 80s because of a crisis in the finances of the college, the College Council decided that a realisable asset would have to be sold to put the college on a firmer financial footing. It was decided that the Charity commissioners should be asked to allow the council to sell 3 pictures from the Oliver Collection. This caused considerable opposition inside the college and in the art world, especially as any pictures sold would probably go abroad. The Times, National Heritage and even the House of Lords got involved in the debate but the sale went ahead and in 1993 the J Paul Getty Museum in California bought the first of the pictures, J M W Turner’s “Van Tromp going about to please his Masters, Ships at Sea, getting a good Wetting” for £11M, a record sum for an English painting. In 1993 the college sold Gainsborough’s “Peasants going to market: early morning” for £3.5M to an anonymous buyer and the 3rd painting Constable’s “View on the Stour near Dedham” was sold in 1995 to a private British collector for £6.7M.
John Elliott in his book “Palaces, Patronage & Pills. Thomas Holloway: his Sanatorium, College & Picture Gallery” writes “The Holloway Collection is unique, not just because so few universities have anything to equal it, but because it is a time capsule of Victorian taste… without any of the selective editing that occurs in modern art galleries”. After his death on 26th December 1883 Holloway’s obituary in the “Art Journal” declared that “The death of Thomas Holloway … removes from the world of art a collector who, had he commenced at an earlier age in his career, would probably have amassed a gallery of modern pictures unequalled in its cost and size”
Items on display:-
The complete list of paintings purchased for the picture collection from “Palaces, Patronage & Pills. Thomas Holloway: his sanatorium, college & picture gallery” by John Elliott. 1996.
The Royal Holloway College Main Floor Plan, drawn by W H Crossland, the architect. (The Recreation Hall to the right of the Main Entrance became the Picture Gallery)
The Picture Gallery in 1895 from “The Royal Holloway College for Women”
“Royal Holloway College a Catalogue of Pictures” compiled by C.W. Carey, curator, 1890, open at a description of ‘The Railway Station’ painted by W P Frith in 1862.
Copies of the three pictures sold from the collection, Turner’s Van Tromp going about to please his masters, ships at sea, getting a good wetting”, Gainsborough’s “Peasants going to market early morning” and Constable’s “View on the Stour near Dedham”
Copies of some of the paintings which attract most interest from visitors
Joan Wintour
July 2011