Victorian Colour

The Victorian Colour Revolution show at the Ashmolean was very worth while - from the sombre black of Queen Victoria's mourning dress, to Turner's palette (and he seems to have had as many pairs of glasses as I do, though kept much more tidily);

to colour swatches of artificially dyed wools;

to some very bright coloured socks;

to bright red underwear - who knew!

Then there were a good range of weird things - what is this tabby doing to a rabbit, or hare, on the side of William Burges' wonderful Great Bookcase?

Then there's the magnificent porcelain Minton peacock;

the Tinted Venus - reminding the Victorians of the crucial fact that classical marble sculptures would have been painted (Elizabeth Barrett Browning found her rather too obscene for her liking);

an African entertainer clapping very energetically in Poynter's Israel in Egypt;

and a painting I just hadn't known, Henry Wyndham Phillips' portrait of the designer and design theorist Owen Jones, standing against the backdrop of the Alhambra Court that he created for the Crystal Palace.

Then I called on some old friends - I didn't remember the rushy pond in the foreground of Uccello's Hunt in the Forest.

I went looking for dandelions, and found a couple that I didn't remember - on the Burne-Jones big cupboard,

and Arthur Hughes' Home from Sea.

And finally, can I just point out that it was very, very wet in Oxford today.  Unpleasantly so.