Note 230 — Chapter II · THE COLLEGES (continued 2)

There is a fine series of most valuable portraits in the Lodge; among them one of Mary, and the standing portrait of the young Henry VIII. which Wordsworth made the subject of a poem. A careful list of university portraits appears at the end of Atkinson’s volume, but such a list—useful and valuable as it is—tucked away somewhere in a book on Cambridge is not an adequate homage to so important a source of university history as these portraits. The loan exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1884-5 was the first attempt to collect the Cambridge pictures: the example was followed by Oxford in 1904-6, and the Catalogue of portraits then published is a model of what can and should be done.

No complete list of the portraits of either university, however, at present exists. Many canvasses remain unidentified or misidentified; some are doubtless perishing for want of care, and the artist’s name has long disappeared from many more. The work therefore that remains to be done is a big one, but is eminently worth the doing.