Maria Margaret Pollen

Maria Margaret La Primaudaye Pollen (10 April 1838 – c. 1919), known as Minnie, was a decorative arts collector. As Mrs John Hungerford Pollen, she became known during the early-twentieth century as an authority on the history of textiles, publishing Seven Centuries of Lace in 1908. Life Maria Margaret La Primaudaye was born into a Huguenot family on 10 April 1838, the third child of the Revd Charles John La Primaudaye, a descendant of Pierre de La Primaudaye. She was educated in Italy. Her family converted to Catholicism in 1851, and it was in Rome that her father met another recent English convert, John Hungerford Pollen, previously an Anglican priest and a decorative artist. She became engaged to Pollen, who was then seventeen years her senior, in the summer of 1854, and was married in the church of Woodchester monastery, near Stroud, Gloucester, on 18 September 1855. The Pollens initially settled in Dublin, where John Hungerford Pollen had been offered the professorship of fine arts at the newly founded University College Dublin, having been introduced to John Henry Newman by Charles La Primaudaye. In the summer of 1857, the Pollens moved to London, where they became enthusiastic members of the artistic and literary community. A renewed friendship with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood led to Pollen's involvement in the decoration of the Oxford Union debating chamber. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who co-ordinated the project, made a portrait sketch of Maria Margaret Pollen in August 1857. The Pollens had ten children, among them the Jesuit historian and archivist, John Hungerford Pollen, and the journalist, inventor, and businessman, Arthur Hungerford Pollen. The church architect, Francis Pollen, was a great-grandson.