John Hungerford Pollen (senior)

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

He was educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1845, with a parish in Leeds from 1847, writing of his experiences.

He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1852. 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.

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. Newman invited him to take up a position at the Catholic University of Ireland, and Pollen was Professor of Fine Arts there, from 1855-57.

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.

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. 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.

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