When You Least Expect It...

I was off-duty on Wednesday.  Mrs Geary, Miss Holman and myself had taken a road trip to The Harry Potter Experience at the Warner Bros Studio at Leavesden, the last place in the world I expected to be surprised by Pre-Raphaelites.  How wrong I was...

We were dressed a bit like witches and were having a jolly time as we entered the huge wooden doors into the Great Hall....

Yes, yes, so far, so un-Pre-Raphaelite, although as you can see by the ghost dress above, the flavour of Hogwarts is a tad Gothic.  The sets are gorgeous and the room beyond the Great Hall is full of set after set, with things hanging or standing, in cases or just in front of you.  There is so much to see that you can spend a goodly amount of time just standing with your mouth open in astonishment.  My day turned a very interesting corner when we were admiring the set of the Gryffindor common room, when I spotted this rather lovely painting...

In the world of Harry Potter, this is a portrait of Professor McGonagall as a young woman.  I was very taken with this picture as it reminded of aesthetic domestic figures, such as this one by James McNeill Whistler...

I thought it was lovely, and made me smile, to think that even in a modern film set I could find Victorian art.  Then I came face to face with a wall of wizarding portraits...

As readers (and viewers) of the Harry Potter stories will know, the portraits that hang on the walls of Hogwarts are magic and the figures can move about and talk.  All of them are famous witches or wizards, and at first glance they seemed to be just made-up paintings.  Then one of them, just level with us, caught my eye...

Unknown Witch...

I know you!  You're Mary Shelley!

Mary Shelley (not a witch, as far as I know)

 At that moment, in the dimmed lighting, I began to scour the wall for other familiar faces...

I found Lord Ribblesdale...

 ...Disraeli...

and Elizabeth Barrett Browning....

and I think I even saw Swinburne, way up in the gloomy top row.  All these portraits were just subtly altered, like the one of Mary Shelley, with the addition of the odd wand or cloak.  There was one that didn't appear to be altered at all and for a moment I just stared and thought 'That wizard is awfully familiar...' because it made perfect sense that he was a wizard...

Of course you're a wizard, William...

It all makes perfect sense...

William Morris makes a very convincing wizard indeed, and what made me chuckle was how little he seemed to have been changed to fit the bill.  I don't know if the person who had painted the portraits had been especially fond of Victorian art, or if the style of Victorian portraiture fitted the general aesthetic of Hogwarts (as envisaged by the film makers), but it was possibly the highlight of my day. And I rode a broomstick, so that is saying something.

Now I need to watch all the films again and see if I can spot William the Wizard.  So that's what he was doing in Iceland....