‘Rossetti used to design wonderfully in pen and ink. I used to do it because I saw him do it, as a pupil does – though I never satisfied myself in it.’15 About this time Burne-Jones began what seems to have been his first finished work, a pen-and-ink drawing, The Waxen Image. He may have put off oil painting because the smell of turpentine made him sick – as it certainly did – or because Rossetti was working mainly in water-colour, but the delay was probably a matter of timidity and sheer inability to afford even the ‘ha’penny colours from the oilman’ which Rossetti said he used (in fact, he dealt with Roberson’s). The two panels of The Waxen Image appear to be an illustration of Rossetti’s poem Sister Helen, but there is an interesting variation: instead of the witch destroying her betrayer, the maiden consults the witch to get her lover back, only to see him die in her arms; and this begins a series of what can only be called defences by Burne-Jones of the femmes fatales of legend and poetry; as far as he was concerned, all pretty women were defensible. The Waxen Image is the first of a series of finely, even anxiously, drawn subjects – even the faintest shadows are cross-hatched – which include Going to the Battle, The Wise and Foolish Virgins, The Kings’ Daughters, Sir Galahad, and The Marriage of Buendelmonte. Buendelmonte, with seventy-one recognisable figures, is the first design to show the typical ambiguous Burne-Jones weather – the central poplars blow in a storm, but others are still – and the first to show a figure of love, which may be crowned or blindfolded; we are not meant to know which. Though they were not the last pen-and-ink drawings he did, they left him with a permanent dislike of what he called ‘etching and scratching, and lines to fill up corners’. When he became a master-draughtsman he found his own instrument – pencil.
One can feel the weight of patient lamp-lit evenings in these drawings, and in fact some of this work, which he carried about everywhere with him in a portfolio, was done at the Macdonalds, where in his loneliness he now called often. He was welcomed as before. Aggie, the prettiest, sat for him – she is the princess on the right in Going to the Battle. To the young ones, ‘Mr Edward’ was a kind instructor who not only helped them with their drawings and history in what seems to have been one of the most natural Victorian relationships of all – teacher and pupil – but gave them a glimpse of a world they had never even suspected, where beauty was an object of reverence instead of earning quiet reproof for worldliness. In return, Ned had to learn yet another language; the Macdonalds called a mind an ‘understander’, idle conversation a ‘mag’ (from ‘magpie’), unhappiness ‘the screws’, and a nap a ‘modest quencher’. ‘Bare is back without brother behind’, the family proverb on the value of friends, he understood well and indeed, in the absence of Morris, felt. He had a bewildered sensation of falling in love with them all. But a sure instinct of self-preservation led him to fifteen-year-old Georgie.
Her photograph taken a few months later, in a buttoned black dress and white collar, shows her almost doll-like in size but with a modest dignity, ready for everything, and with a look as though she were about to swallow life like a plum and was not quite sure if she approved of it. Her hair, which at this date had bronze tints in it, is smoothed down and the pose does not show her grey eyes. Several writers have described, and Burne-Jones frequently painted, the sensation of meeting their fearless crystalline gaze, which did not so much seem to reprove small-mindedness as refuse to admit its existence at all. Yet Georgie was sympathetic, kind and witty, not least about her own misadventures.
Her firmness met Ned’s gentleness; they fell truly in love and he began courting. She was learning drawing at the new Government Schools of Design which were then at Gore House, Kensington, and he could escort her there. He also attended Hinde Street chapel, which he hated, but the Macdonalds went nowhere else on Sundays. It was in this way that he learned that Georgie, like himself, no longer believed in doctrinal Christianity. He took her to the Academy – her second visit – to see April Love, now Morris’s property, Hunt’s Scapegoat, Millais’s Blind Girl; Georgie had also seen the Ophelia, but so far had never been allowed to read Shakespeare, and of course had never been to a theatre.
In three weeks they were engaged. When Ned ‘spoke’ to Georgie’s father he was asked nothing about his prospects, which could not well have been worse, but was given consent simply on consideration of character. Mr Jones was told, in his turn, by Ned at the side of his mother’s grave, and made a bewildered visit to London. Ned and Georgie agreed on the day of their wedding, however distant: it would be the same as his day of acceptance – 9 June, the anniversary of the death of Beatrice. Georgie felt the excitement and the honour when she was taken to what she calls ‘the shrine of Blackfriars’; on Rossetti, who did not know much about Methodist ministers’ households, she made the impression of a country violet.
‘I love you all more than life, and George in some intense way that never can be expressed in words,’ Burne-Jones wrote to ten-year-old Louie, the youngest of the sisters, in the August of 1856. If the Reverend George Macdonald, unworldly in his study, had little idea of what an artist’s life entailed, Burne-Jones himself had not much more. He envisaged himself and Georgie, Morris and Louie, working and learning together in some secluded place, a tower, or a small town with streets leading into the fields, though this, like his dream at the monastery at Charnwood, was a delusion – he needed streets, traffic and company to be at his best. As a practical step, he began to attend night classes in life drawing at Leigh’s16 in Newman Street; Louie was helped with ‘her’ pen-and-ink subjects, one of which was a Sleeping Princess. When the Memorials tell us that ‘the figure … is the same type that he used in 1890’, Georgie means that in 1856 the unawakened girl was drawn from herself, just as thirty-odd years later it would be drawn from her daughter.
In August 1856, Street moved his office from Oxford to Bloomsbury, and there was no reason why Morris should not share rooms with Ned. They took furnished lodgings near Street’s new office, in Upper Gordon Street. These, however, were disapproved of; ‘Gabriel thought them too expensive, and he was worried at our not knowing how to help ourselves’,17 though a reference to Ned shouting for his dinner suggests that the standard of living had been raised. Rossetti suggested his old rooms at 17 Red Lion Square, which he had once shared with Walter Deverell. Morris, of course, must be a painter, and even Dixon, on a visit from Oxford, was persuaded to try – so was Philip Webb, the head clerk from Street’s and Morris’s staunch companion; Webb, however, made too many exact measurements to get started at all.18 Morris, after a heroic struggle to carry on at Street’s and do six hours’ drawing a day at art school, threw in his hand and took up almost the only craft which he could never master – painting. For this, old Mrs Morris blamed Burne-Jones, her son’s quiet friend whom she had liked so much, and who had even listened to stories of William’s nursery days until firmly stopped by Morris himself; she divined, with maternal shrewdness, the real balance of will-power between them.
Mrs Morris may well have been right. If Morris had remained in the profession of putting solid buildings on the earth and designing large spaces, like the barns and cathedrals he loved, for extended family groups, he might not have been driven through life by ‘these outstretched feverish hands, this restless heart’.
The relationship between Rossetti and Morris had in it, from the very beginning, a hint of uneasiness. Morris tried to submit totally, but couldn’t; he had no more talent for humble discipleship than for painting. Burne-Jones recalled that ‘it was funny to see them together … [Rossetti]’d say to Morris as he came in of a morning, what do you think about that? and Morris would say well, old chap, mightn’t it be put up a bit?’19 Again, Morris was well off and a buyer (he had bought the Fra Pace), and Rossetti could never feel cordially towards patrons. Worse still, the robust and fattening Morris seemed never to be ill, scarcely even ‘seedy’.
The move to Red Lion Square was made at the end of November 1856. Although the front window had been cut to give a higher lig
ht, the rooms were shabby, dark and unfurnished and had apparently not been cleaned for the last five years, since Rossetti, supervising, was still able to recognise an address which poor Deverell had scribbled on the wall. They were also remarkable for their dampness. ‘When Deverell got ill and retired to the back room, the doctor came out and patted Rossetti’s head and said “poor boys! poor boys!”’20 The move was exhausting, the first ‘respectable housekeeper’ Morris engaged was intoxicated. She was replaced by the ‘unfailing good temper’ of Red Lion Mary, who soon gave up the battle for cleanliness. She, however, was prepared to sew draperies and read bits from Reynolds’ Newspaper to Ned as he painted, and could equally well provide ‘victuals and squalor at all hours’ (his own phrase) or a suitable lunch for Louie Macdonald, who made them wait for it while she pronounced a blessing. It is surprising to find, even among helpless Victorian lodgers, that Mary had to wind up their watches and musical boxes and issued them with clean nightgowns only when she felt like it, but not surprising that Ned was favoured in this and in every other way. Although Morris paid the greater share of the rent, he took the smallest room without hesitation: Ned was delicate, and needed good air. In spite of this, Burne-Jones was the wild centre of evening parties, an energetic theatre-goer, and a superb teller of ghost stories in the dimly-lit studio.
The emptiness of the rooms led to some of Morris’s first experiments in design, and the ordering of hugely mediaeval furniture in solid wood. Burne-Jones’s first illustration of Chaucer, and first attempt at applied art, was on the wardrobe, designed by Webb, which he decorated towards the end of their tenancy with scenes from the Prioress’s Tale. Earnest and touching as the design is, it conceals a typical Burne-Jones allusion to Chaucer’s unfortunate little St Hugh – ‘I saye that in a wardrobe they him threwe’, that is, in a privy. In the end the wardrobe, which is now in the Victoria and Albert, became Ned’s wedding present to Morris, who took it with him wherever he moved.
The two friends had begun to live out Hand and Soul, realising both sides of Rossetti’s metaphor, as interpreters of the dream and as mediaeval handicraftsmen. The measurements of the furniture were wrong, and Burne-Jones did not know how to lay the ground for his colours, but they persevered in the spirit of Ruskin’s ‘stern habit of doing the thing with my own hands till I know all its difficulties’. Here Rossetti could not teach them, although he goodnaturedly tried his hand at painting the chairs.
Rossetti, however, began to carry them tempestuously about with him wherever he went. Burne-Jones’s life was one of expanding circles of friendship; the first had been the Brotherhood; now he entered the second. He was introduced, first of all, to the survivors of the P.R.B. and its followers: Arthur Hughes again, Millais, with whose highly-strung emotional nature Ned felt immediately in tune, James Smetham, Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, F.G. Stephens, by now resigned (‘Stephens is Stephens still’ as Rossetti described him) to a life as a dullish journalist and faithful friend and correspondent to the rest. Burne-Jones learned from Stephens to smoke clay pipes, and in 1890 was still writing to him: ‘Get well and strong, dear fellow, and we’ll smoke long clays when we are eighty.’21 All these older friends took more or less kindly to the strange spirit of gaiety which had swept over Gabriel on the acquisition of these new disciples. ‘Calling one day on Gabriel at his rooms in Blackfriars,’ Hunt wrote, ‘I saw, sitting at a second easel, an ingenuous and particularly gentle young man whose modest bearing and enthusiasm at once charmed. He was introduced to me as “Jones”, and was called “Ned”.’ Towards Hunt, who had just returned from the Middle East, Rossetti’s conscience was not quite clear, and it was on this occasion that Ned saw him passing his paintbrush again and again, conciliatingly, through Hunt’s golden beard. Hunt, however, marked this Jones as a young man – at last – who might be taught something, to draw properly, not to use vermilion, to go to Field’s, the only place, in Hunt’s opinion, for colours. James Smetham has left a similar impression in his little pen-and-wash drawing of Burne-Jones watching nervously while two visitors ‘overlook’ his work on the easel.
Another call, which seemed very far west in a hansom cab, was to Little Holland House, the home of the Prinseps and the studio of G.F. Watts. Here Rossetti introduced him as ‘the genius of the age’, and Mrs Prinsep, pitying his embarrassment, also marked him down as someone in need of protection. Val Princep, the painter son of the house, was under the spell of Gabriel, and recalled that at this time the ‘main requirements’, apart from trying to catch Rossetti’s intonation, ‘were to read Sidonia and Browning’. This of course Ned had done, and now he had the further honour of being taken to Devonshire Place to meet the Brownings.
Also present that evening was Charles Eliot Norton, the American scholar and man of letters. ‘Twelve years ago I met one evening at Brownings’ … two young fellows lately from Oxford named Morris and Jones. Jones very shy and quiet, and seemed half overpowered by the warmth of eulogy which Browning bestowed on a drawing that Jones had brought to show him – a drawing … of infinite detail, quaint, but full of real feeling and real fancy.’ This was probably the Waxen Image; to show it was an ordeal, and Elizabeth Browning, Norton tells us, tried in vain to put Ned at his ease.
Norton was also a dear friend of Ruskin, whom he had met in this same year, 1856, on a tour of Switzerland, when he had ventured to introduce his sisters on board a lake steamer. If this suggests an early story by Henry James it is not surprising, since Norton was also to be James’s mentor in matters of art. Wherever Norton enters the course of events, there is a breath of Bostonian high-mindedness, goodness and tedium.
Ruskin was a different matter, and by the winter of 1856 he was calling at Red Lion Square every Thursday, or even more often, ‘better than his books, which are the best books in the world’. Ruskin, carrying away drawings, fussing and advising, was extending his patronage and his need, half shrinking and half effusive, to love and be loved. Here Burne-Jones came out to meet him, and the sympathy between them was something that would outlast disagreements, and even the darkness of insanity. Burne-Jones understood not only the greatness of Ruskin but his strange reversions to infancy, the compensation for a lonely childhood. Whereas Madox Brown was critical when Ruskin was ‘rompish’ and helped himself too frequently to cake, and Rossetti saw him ‘in person [as] an absolute guy’, Burne-Jones was never surprised to find him at the circus, at the Christie minstrels, or dancing a Scottish reel; his unaffected admiration made nothing of Ruskin’s oddities, though the balance of relationships was delicate. ‘He was a most difficult child.’ But this mattered nothing in comparison with the warm of meeting another ‘scorner of the world’. This was Ruskin’s message as well as Newman’s. It is to the credit of humanity that whenever it has been clearly put, there have always been people to attend to it.
This can have been one of the few periods in Burne-Jones’s life when he was not reading Ruskin, since he had given every copy he possessed to Georgie as a betrothal present. Meanwhile, Georgie and Morris drew together only slowly, but Ned of course still had his permitted outings with his sweetheart – now referred to as ‘my stunner’, although, as Norton noticed, she looked not Pre-Raphaelite, but exactly like a Stothard print. One outing where pennilessness did not matter was to the National Gallery, which, though it was still hemmed in with washhouses and barracks, had started its career as a representative collection. Under Sir Charles Eastlake it now had an annual purchasing grant of £10,000 and a clear mandate to buy early German and Italian pictures, for the ‘primitive rooms’, with Ruskin to advise on how to protect them against London soot.
Here Burne-Jones studied the Van Eyck Marriage of Arnolfini (acquired in 1842). The year before his death he told Georgie that his whole life long he had hoped to do something as rich and deep in colour as the Arnolfini, and now it was too late. ‘It’s all very well to say it’s a purple dress – very dark brown is more like it.’ The extreme depths of the blacks, the corresponding whites with no pure whi
te in them, the strange room, the tender marriage symbolism, the orange, the famous mirror (which Holman Hunt had already copied in The Lost Child) continued to haunt him. In 1858 the gallery also possessed Botticelli’s Virgin and Child, the Three Maries from the Lombardo-Baldi collection, and three Perugino panels, one of which, the St Michael, has a waisted suit of fantastic armour, like birds’ wings or fishes’ scales; this is the dream armour which Burne-Jones already preferred to careful historical reconstructions. To go forward a little, in 1860 the gallery acquired the Filippo Lippi Annunciation which Ned studied in hopeless admiration at its use of gold, and Fra Angelico’s Christ Glorified in the Courts of Heaven, surely the origin of Morris’s remark that the heads in a picture should be ‘all in a row, like shillings’. In 1862 came the Piero di Cosimo Mythological Subject (then called the Death of Procris). In front of these pictures the shadow of the young Burne-Jones, in his soft hat, must still hover, as it does in the tapestry courts ‘like little chapels’ of what was then the South Kensington Museum. No amount of travel abroad could give him the familiar love which he had for these treasures when he had scarcely a shilling in his pocket.
Edward Burne-Jones Page 7