We all did hear about, a few years back, the sale of a Francis Bacon painting by Pembroke College. And we were horrified. However, the sale of the painting (that cost £150 to buy and was for donkey's years locked in the library) brought the college the great sum of £400,000 which was then used to help poorer students, purchase new art works and maintain the existing collection.

Pembroke was the first college to collect art in Oxford. It all started 70 years ago when a mature student, Anthony Emery, decided to start the project. Before becoming a student, Emery served as an Infantry Officer and was twice a prisoner of war. During his stay at Brunswick in 1944, he gave a lecture dressed as Salvator Dali, i.e. in a diving suit (let's hope he did not suffocate like our Catalan artist!) But nobody in the audience got the reference. He realised then how little most of his fellow prisoners knew about contemporary art. (I cannot help thinking what a shame he did not meet the French composer Olivier Messiaen, who also was a war prisoner but not at the same place). That later led him to persuade each Pembroke student to give £1 each term towards the JCR (Junior Common Room) Art Fund. Much later, a reluctant student, who at first refused to pay but was invited to the art committee, admitted that the whole experience “civilised" him. And even today, the system of lending art works to students' rooms is still in use!

I could go on and on about the story of the art collection at Pembroke, its ups and downs, for example how a Hockney went away and never returned... But there is however a special edition catalogue available on sale at the exhibition that will explain things much better than I do. Let's just say that students still participate in the fund but, thanks to a donation, the college also has had a professional art curator since 2014. We very much hope that more contemporary art will be bought by the college, and of course, that the collection will always be available to view by the general public.

A few of my favourite paintings were: Cinema Paradiso by Jean Cooke, Still life by Duncan Grant, Girls in Provence by Mary Fedden, Russian Village by Julian Trevelyan but perhaps your favourites will be works by the Cypher Artist Collective or David Hockney or Lynn Chadwick. There's only one way to find out...