George Powell (collector)

[5][6] Morris and Edward Burne-Jones spent "much time reading and discussing" Le Morte d'Arthur while at Oxford, and Rossetti contributed designs for woodcut illustrations to the Arthurian poems in an 1857 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's work.

Swinburne had first read the story of Tristan and Iseult as a child, and at Oxford, influenced by Morris, wrote a number of Arthurian poems including Queen Yseult, Lancelot and Joyeuse Garde.

"[8] In a short fictional work, L'anglais d'Etretat, the French writer Guy de Maupassant said of Powell: "He loved the supernatural, the macabre, the tortured, the intricate and every form of derangement.

"[8] Neil Holland, Senior Curator of Collections at Aberystwyth University, points out that Powell followed in "the tradition of many eccentric collectors such as Ludwig II of Bavaria and William Beckford" and "flirted with the boundaries of acceptable behaviour" although on "rather a less lavish scale.

The collection is "imbued with Powell's own slant on the world," as Holland points out, and "representative of his personal enthusiasms [with] strong significance as precious souvenirs of friends and relics of heroes"; but it includes many objects "'without provenance', 'attributed', copies or even fakes.