Books

Title: The Founders’ Gift, impressions from a collection

Author: Robert Fraser, b. 1947

Shrouded in winter light, a frost-bitten painter breathes on his finger-tips to stir them into life. In a debtors’ prison in London, two sisters whisper of shame, exclusion and disgrace. A dog barks at a press-gang. Bound for a cathedral city, some storm-tossed travellers bicker about the meaning
of existence. Obliquely, sometimes surprisingly, this sequence of poems explores thirty-two of the pictures, including Edwin Long’s The Babylonian Marriage Market (1875), donated by the philanthropist Thomas Holloway (1800-83), to the college he endowed in memory of his wife, Jane (1814-1875).

Victorian Taste – The Complete Catalogue of Paintings by Jeannie Chapel

Bedford College, Memories of 150 Years

A fascinating pictorial record of the first 125 years of the College. The book, first published in 1993 under the title A Pictorial History has been redesigned and reprinted with new material added to cover the years up to 2012.

The Price of Beauty: Edwin Long’s Babylonian Marriage Market

Thomas Holloway, Victorian Philanthropist

Oil Paintings in Public Ownership in Surrey, The Public Catalogue Foundation

The Holloway Sanatorium by Guy Blythman

W H Crossland: An Architectural Biography by Sheila Binns

Palaces, Patronage and Pills: Thomas Holloway, the Sanatorium, the College and the Picture Collection by John Elliott