John Hungerford Pollen

John Hungerford Pollen (1820–1902) was an English writer on crafts and furniture. Life Pollen 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. Pollen 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, and 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 to 1857.