R E T U R N T O VA L H A L L A THE PORTRAIT OF PROFESSOR WILLIAM FARISH BY HENRY PERRONET BRIGGS In a past edition of the College Magazine, Gareth Atkins commented on the removal of the College’s portrait of Charles Kingsley from Hall, and taught us all a good deal more about Kingsley in the process.1 Recent visitors and eagle-eyed residents may have noticed that Kingsley’s replacement has now been replaced in its turn. Not by the father of The Water Babies (he now presides over Benson Hall), but by H P Briggs’s portrait of Professor William Farish (1757–1837).
William Farish by Henry Perronet Briggs, 1813
The name of William Farish is probably less familiar to most readers than that of Charles Kingsley. So why the preference? After all, authority for Kingsley’s place in what Dr Atkins calls the College’s ‘Valhalla’ comes from no less than Benson himself who, in The leaves of the tree (1912), recalls how the ‘strangely contrasted’ portraits of Kingsley and Pepys ‘gaze at each other across the long tables’ of his College’s ‘little paneled hall’.2 Farish’s cause finds support in nothing so romantic. His prior claim, however, is clearly attested in the first edition of Le Keux’s Memorials of Cambridge (1842), which in turn draws on a description in The Cambridge Guide of 1830.3
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