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).

Detailed Description

Robert Fraser has been writing poetry about paintings since his response to Camille Pissarro’s Fox Hill in the Snow appeared in the National Poetry Competition anthology. His many books include biographies of two twentieth-century English poets, and he has taught at Royal Holloway and at the universities of Cambridge and Leeds. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

The book itself is a paperback volume of 33 poems and 33 corresponding colour illustrations over 67 pages.  All proceeds will support the College and the cost includes standard UK delivery, for overseas delivery please email [email protected] for further information.