The story
During exams at Royal Holloway, one painting is covered with a Union Jack. It is Edwin Landseer's Man Proposes, God Disposes of 1864, two polar bears among the wreckage of a lost Arctic expedition, a subject prompted by Sir John Franklin's ships, which vanished in the ice after 1845. Student legend says that looking at it during an exam brings failure, and the covering began in the 1970s to calm one anxious candidate.
Royal Holloway is first of all a university college, part of the University of London, on a hillside campus at Egham in Surrey. It owns an art collection because of its founder, Thomas Holloway, who made a fortune selling patent pills and ointments. Between 1881 and 1883 he bought more than 70 Victorian paintings at auction for the college for women he was building. He died before Queen Victoria opened it in 1886.
The pictures still hang in the Picture Gallery inside the Founder's Building, a huge red-brick and stone range designed by the architect William Henry Crossland after the French château of Chambord. The most expensive purchase was Edwin Long's The Babylonian Marriage Market, a scene from the Greek historian Herodotus in which young women are auctioned as brides. In 1882 its price was among the highest ever paid for a modern painting.
