John Hungerford Pollen (senior)

John Hungerford Pollen (1820-1902) was an English artist and writer on crafts and furniture.

Life

He was educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford.http://www.answers.com/topic/john-hungerford-pollen-2] He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1845, with a parish in Leeds from 1847, writing of his experiences."Concise Dictionary of National Biography"] [http://www.bartleby.com/222/1218.html]

He became a Catholic convert and left the Church of England in 1852. [http://www.universitychurch.ie/NewmanAndTheChurch.html] He worked on numerous decorative projects in the 1850s, starting with the hall ceiling at Merton College, Oxford, where he was a Fellow from 1842; his conversion entailed his giving up that fellowship. Other works, mainly in collaboration, were on the University Museum in Oxford, and the Arthurian murals at the Oxford Union, in a group led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and including William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Val Prinsep, and Roddam Spencer Stanhope. [Carolyne Larrington, "King Arthur's Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition" (20060, p. 157.]

He worked with John Henry Newman on church architecture and decoration. He was responsible for the design of the Catholic University Church in Dublin. He also worked on the Brompton Oratory. [http://www.opw.ie/about/Obair_June_2006/section000026.html] [http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47518] Newman invited him to take up a position at the Catholic University of Ireland, and Pollen was Professor of Fine Arts there, from 1855 to 1857. [Frederick O'Dwyer, "The Architecture of Deane and Woodward" (1997), p. 292.]

He returned to England in 1857, settling in Hampstead, London. He worked for "The Tablet", and through John Everett Millais expanded his contacts with the Pre-Raphaelite circle. ["Dictionary of National Biography. Edited by Sidney Lee. Second Supplement. Volume 3. Neil - Young", article on Pollen.]

Later he worked for the South Kensington Museum, where he was appointed assistant keeper in 1863, and was made editor to its science and art department, producing catalogues. [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1026/is_/ai_18777559] He compiled with Henry Cole a "Universal Catalogue of Books on Art". This was a multi-volume project, beginning publication in 1870, its aim being to furnish a complete bibliographical record of art books in libraries of the West. [http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/prints_books/prints_books/books/index.html] [http://www.vam.ac.uk/nal/policy/index.html]

Works

*Letter to the Parishioners of St. Saviour’s, Leeds (1851)
*Narrative of Five Years at St. Saviour’s, Leeds (1851)
*A Description of the Trajan Column (1874) [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Europe/Italy/Lazio/Roma/Rome/Trajans_Column/John_Pollen/home.html online text]
* Ancient and modern Furniture and Woodwork (1876)
* Gold and Silver Smiths' Work

Family

The architect C. R. Cockerell was his uncle. [http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-157857_ITM] He married Maria Margaret La Primaudaye in 1855. As Maria Pollen, she was known as an author on lace. [ [http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Pollen%2C%20Maria Seven Centuries of Lace (1908), online text] ]

Of ten children, John Hungerford Pollen, Jesuit and writer, was his third child, [http://www.bautz.de/bbkl/p/pollen_j.shtml BBK page, in German] inventor Arthur Pollen was his sixth son. [Jon Tetsuro Sumida, "In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1889-1914" (1993), p. 76.]

Further reading

*Anne Pollen (1920) "John Hungerford Pollen, 1820-1902"

Notes