The Pre-Raphaelites in Oxford: Ashmolean Museum - Paintings and Sculpture

Most of the paintings we look at here are from the Combe Bequest. John Everett Millais first came to Oxford in 1846 to visit his half-brother, and met James Wyatt, a picture dealer who had a shop in the High Street. Wyatt commissioned paintings from Millais, and in 1850 he introduced him to Thomas Combe and his wife Martha, who had no children of their own, and virtually adopted him and his young friends, starting with Charles Alston Collins (1828-1873). They stayed at his house -- Millais even spent Christmas with them in 1850, which surprised his own family. In 1851 Holman Hunt spent Christmas there, and in turn became a kind of adopted son. The Combes bought important religious paintings, including Hunt's Light of the World which can be seen in the chapel of Keble College. Combe was known as "the Early Christian" and was a good friend of John Henry Newman.

Works discussed:

Charles Alston Collins, William Bennett (1850)
John Everett Millais, Thomas Combe (1850)
John Everett Millais, The Return of the Dove to the Ark (1851)
William Holman Hunt, A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (1850)
Charles Alston Collins, Convent Thoughts (1851)
Thomas Woolner, bust of Thomas Combe (1863)
John William Inchbold, A Study, in March (1855)
William Holman Hunt, The Festival of St Swithin (The Dovecot) (1866-75)

http://www.history.brookes.ac.uk