Oxford Union murals

The series was executed by a team of Pre-Raphaelite artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

The murals were commissioned by John Ruskin and the subject was probably chosen as a result of earlier Pre-Raphaelite interest in Arthurian themes, such as the illustrations to Edward Moxon's 1857 edition of Tennyson.

These were the painters Val Prinsep, Arthur Hughes, J. H. Pollen, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope and the sculptor Alexander Munro.

"[2] As the murals were painted directly onto the wall without plaster or adequate underpainting they began to suffer decay very quickly.

In 1906 Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite colleague William Holman Hunt, who had not been directly involved, wrote a book on the history of the decorations.

The unfinished mural painted by Rossetti
Rossetti's design for Sir Lancelot's Vision of the Holy Grail
A close up of Jane Burden, later Morris, in Rossetti's Sir Lancelot's Vision of the Holy Grail
The murals compete with the light from the windows
A view of the murals of the Oxford Union Society Library at night time