Artware Fineart has dated this Victorian Architectural Interior Painting to the 1800s.
Interior of the Formal Hall of Magdalene College, Cambridge
Signed/Inscribed:
signed and titled , verso, in carved giltwood Florentine frame
oil on board
35 x 25 cm. (13.3/4 x 9.3/4 in.)
Magdalene College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.
Magdalene College has some of the grandest benefactors including Britain's premier noble the Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Chief Justice Christopher Wray. However the refoundation was largely the work of Thomas Audley, Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII. Audley also gave the college its motto—garde ta foy (Old French: "keep your faith"). Audley's successors in the Mastership and as benefactors of the College were, however, prone to dire ends; several benefactors were arraigned at various stages on charges of high treason and executed.
The college's most famous alumnus is Samuel Pepys, whose papers and books were donated to the college upon his death, and are now housed in the Pepys Building. The college boasts a portrait of the famous diarist by Peter Lely, which hangs in the Hall.
Magdalene is noted for its 'traditional' style: it boasts a well-regarded candlelit formal hall (held every evening) and was the last all-male college in Oxford or Cambridge to admit women in 1988 (Oriel College was the last in Oxford, admitting women in 1985). This change resulted in protests by some male undergraduates, including the wearing of black armbands and flying the college flag at half-mast.
Magdalene's old buildings are representative of the college's ramshackle growth from a monks' foundation into a centre of education. It is also distinctive in that most of the old buildings are in brick rather than stone (save for the frontage of the Pepys Building). Magdalene Street divides the most ancient courts from more recent developments. One of the accommodation blocks in the newer part of the college was built by Edwin Lutyens in the early 1930s. Opened in 2005, Cripps Court, on Chesterton Road, features new undergraduate rooms and conference facilities.
Magdalene remains, despite this 20th-century expansion, one of the smaller colleges within the University, numbering some 300 undergraduates and an expanding postgraduate community.
The hall dates from 1519 but was greatly altered in 1714, when the walls were rewainscotted and the original timber roof concealed by a plaster ceiling; the gallery, with its double staircase, was constructed, incorporating a good deal of earlier woodwork, and over the dais was painted a remarkable group of heraldic 'achievements' which, having become almost invisible, were brought vividly to life again by a very careful process of cleaning in 1949.
Artist Biography
Joseph Murray Ince was born in 1806 (some say in London) and he spent his childhood in Presteigne in Radnorshire. Ince was certain of his career and as a career choice took immediately to painting. Joseph Murray Ince was born in London in April 1806 and christened Josef-Marie Ince. His father was Dr Henry Robert Ince, who came from a family of skilled craftsmen, though he trained as a doctor and worked as a military surgeon; while his mother was Anne-Elisabeth, daughter of Comte le Jeune, an émigré from Revolutionary Paris. At the time of his birth, the family was living at Upper Grafton Street. Soon after Ince was born, his father was invited by an old friend to set up as a general practitioner in Presteign, Radnorshire, Wales. The family rented Roseland, Broad Street, and Ince attended John Beddoes Free Grammar School. During his childhood, he befriended John Scarlett Davis of Leominster who, like him, shared his passions f
Artware Fineart has dated this Victorian Architectural Interior Painting to the 1800s.
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Joseph Murray Ince, 1806 - 1859 Interior of the Formal Hall of Magdalene College, Cambridge
