Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The book which expressed what Ned could hardly put in words about these pictures was Rio’s Poetry of Christian Art, translated in 1845 because of what the introduction calls ‘the daily increasing taste and appreciation of early Italian art’. This, of course, was a sign of the times. Christian Art, in fact, is the heroine of the book, brought to life by Giotto, humbly served by Fra Angelico, cruelly betrayed by the Medici, who favoured profane poetry and banking houses, rescued by Savonarola, betrayed again by the ‘defection’ of Raphael; in Venice she was in her glory with Carpaccio, and Rio speaks of visitors ‘whose looks and gestures showed that the picture of St Ursula sleeping had put them into an ecstasy’, but once again she was betrayed by Squarcione, rescued just in time by Gentile Bellini, and destroyed by the paganism of the seventeenth century. Aesthetic considerations are not Rio’s concern. Botticelli is little mentioned; Ruskin’s (and Proust’s) favourites, the blonde-haired Daughters of Jethro in the Vatican, are criticised because they draw attention away from Moses. But Rio has presented the history of Italian art as an adventure worthy of Sintram. This was the book which Ned put aside to give to Georgie on their wedding day.

  This was a year when the air seemed ‘sweet and full of bells’ to Burne-Jones, and although Morris, in a letter of 1875, recalls these as the ‘tin-pot bells of St Pancras’, he also calls them ‘well-remembered days, when all adventure was ahead’. Later still, in 1893, Burne-Jones wrote to Mrs Helen Gaskell that he was alone in London and;

  it was a little like it was when I first came to London and hadn’t a friend … I wandered alone the streets looking in pawn-brokers’ shops, and went over all the streets I used to know, I even dined at the same place where I first dined with Gabriel the first time I was admitted to that heavenly company and I thought and thought and thought.22

  So sure an instinct has the human heart for its happiest time.

  5

  1856–60

  THE LONG ENGAGEMENT

  There is a mild irritation in Rossetti’s letter to Allingham on 16 December 1856: ‘Jones is doing designs (after doing the ingenuous and the abject for so long) which quite put one to shame, so full they are of everything.’ But there is also his characteristic generosity, and he threw himself into finding some way for Ned to make a living. His method of doing this was to praise his protégé to the skies as ‘unrivalled by any man I know’, to produce examples from his capacious pockets, and to approach even his own not too numerous patrons; these had come to know him and made their own deductions. The Illustrated London News not surprisingly turned down the idea of the quite inexperienced young Jones working for them as a draughtsman. Gabriel next approached James Powell and Son, the glass manufacturers. According to May Morris, he told them that a ‘young chap called Jones would do them some good stuff’. For this firm Burne-Jones produced his first cartoon for a window.

  This cartoon, The Good Shepherd, is a strong apprentice’s design in Rossetti’s manner, a broad-hatted Christ with nail-holes in large square hands, ‘in such a dress as is fit for walking the fields and hills’, carrying a sheep which chews the vine-leaves round his hat. Although it drove Ruskin ‘wild with joy’ it seems not to have been used until 1861, when it was carried out for the congregational church in King Street, Maidstone. But Powell’s commissioned more work, the Adam and Eve, Tower of Babel and Solomon and Sheba for St Andrew’s College, Bradfield, a window for Waltham Abbey and, at the suggestion of the architect Woodward, the St Frideswide window for Christ Church, Oxford. This (although Malcolm Bell tells us that Burne-Jones was thrown out by being supplied with the wrong measurements) is truly the ‘stained glass of a stunner’ as he described it to Swinburne, who was writing the ‘labels’ – a dazzling mass of jewel colour, strikingly different from his St Cecilia of 1874 on the opposite side of the chancel. In these first designs, he indicated the lead lines and the colouring himself.

  Two points may be made about the beginning of his thirty years’ career as a great designer of windows. First, it was absolutely necessary to the life that Morris and he had mapped out for themselves that their art should be, as far as possible, public. ‘Portable art is ignoble art,’ says Ruskin in The Two Paths, and none of Browning’s Men and Women affected Burne-Jones more than the Pictor Ignotus who shrinks from the private patron:

  These buy and sell our pictures, take and give

  Count them for garniture and household stuff,

  And where they live must needs our pictures live …

  The beauty of art should be for as many people as possible to stand in front of; it should ‘show people things’. Secondly, his earliest attempts made it clear that Burne-Jones was born with the gift of filling spaces. This natural gift of design he estimated calmly, knowing it was necessary but wanting to learn other things, and never confusing it with Chiaro’s struggle to paint the soul. This is well shown by his attitude to Japanese art, which he tried to explain to the earnestly collecting William Michael Rossetti. ‘Japanese art is well placed and no more; but the making of patterns is no trifle – it’s a rare gift to be able to do it.’1

  With easel painting he went ahead much more slowly, and here, whatever the Pictor Ignotus might say, private patrons must be found, and without exhibitions, since Rossetti hated them. Apart from Ruskin and Mrs Street, who bought The Waxen Image, Burne-Jones’s first patron was T.E. Plint, a kindly and (as it turned out) not very businesslike Leeds businessman. He had the habit of paying artists in advance for their work, which Rossetti regarded as a mere stockbroker’s device in the hope of rising values; but in fact Plint meant kindly, and understood what it was to be tinless. For him Ned began on two water-colour panels: ‘I have chosen the Blessed Damozel for my year’s work.’ But this was to be interrupted.

  It is difficult to tell at this distance of time why, in the summer of 1857, Rossetti suddenly decided to remove his followers from London to Oxford to decorate the new Debating Hall of the Union building. Rossetti, as a friend of the architect Benjamin Woodward, seems to have expected to get a definite commission for work on the Museum and may have been offered the Union in compensation. Certainly the Building Committee was induced to agree without waiting for a general meeting. The artists’ materials and board (this would only mean half-price vacation lodgings) were to be paid, but they were to give their work free. The inducing must have been done by Rossetti and Morris, who came to Oxford with him, for Woodward was a sick man, soon to be a dying one. It was, in any case, hard to get an opinion from his firm, since Woodward was completely silent, his partner Sir James Deane chattered and Deane’s son stammered.

  The commission was to undertake what was then called a fresco, but was actually painting direct on to the brick walls of the gallery. The gallery was pierced with twenty six-foil windows, the light from which would in any case make the surrounding decoration almost invisible. Rossetti also without consultation, decided on a series of scenes from the Morte d’Arthur. He thought he could manage two of them himself.

  This meant returning to London to recruit eight more artists. Madox Brown, the old professional who had been carefully trained in every branch of his art by Baron Wappers, stoutly refused to take part. Philip Webb and Street, who knew a good deal about mural painting, seem not to have been consulted. Morris and Ned of course would come, even though this meant Ned stopping work on his commission for Mr Plint. Arthur Hughes, who had worked for a time in Rossetti’s studio, came uncomplainingly. Spencer Stanhope was a well-off, well connected, unassuming young painter who had studied under Watts, and had had a studio directly underneath Rossetti’s in Chatham Place. He came, and so, rather against his mother’s better judgement, did young Val Prinsep. Staying as a guest with Woodward was a much more considerable figure, John Hungerford Pollen, who was now Professor of Fine Arts in the Catholic Univeristy of Dublin. It was he who had decorated the ceiling of Merton chapel, and he brought with him assistants, including Miss Smythe, model for the angels, and the support of the ‘artistic ladies’ wh
o were beginning to make their appearance in North Oxford. Rossetti calculated that the work could be done in six weeks.

  This leads one to wonder how seriously the authorities took the idea in the first place. The ‘frescoes’ were to be done on whitewash and could always be whitewashed over again, as indeed Rossetti eventually suggested that they should be. When in the end it became clear that the project would never be finished, the committee had the last three bays finished without difficulty by William Rivière.

  Meanwhile Morris and Burne-Jones were sent on ahead, and took lodgings at 87 High Street. When Rossetti arrived they lived like a band of paint-stained, clay-smoking brothers, rejecting invitations to dinners and ‘evenings’, even on one occasion taking a train up to London and back to avoid them. It seems remarkable that they were asked out so often, until it is remembered that Stanhope and Prinsep were both very eligible young men.

  As to the work itself, Rossetti’s colour scheme of blues, reds and greens was undoubtedly a brilliant one, though it was blackened by the gas chandeliers within a year. The photographic reproductions edited by Holman Hunt in 19062 also show that Rossetti’s design of Lancelot’s Vision of the Sanc Grael was the only one of reasonable standard, but the plaster was not dry, and the small brushes he had ordered were quite inadequate. Perhaps because he realised this, Rossetti seems to have changed his mind and decided not to take the project seriously either. The stories of larks on the scaffolding and frightening quantities of soda water ordered in from the Star Hotel give an atmosphere of farce, but the younger painters were seriously trying to prove themselves. ‘Over the work the boy’s curls fell.’ Hunt, staying with the Combes, noticed Ned’s ‘personal manner of beseeching earnestness’, and Val Prinsep remembered him gliding in before the door was half open and sitting straight down to a pen-and-ink drawing. Morris, having made a mess of his painting, slaved away at the decoration of the roof, with the help of faithful Charlie Faulkner, now a Fellow of University College. Poor Arthur Hughes also worked seriously; he had even brought his dress clothes, and it is painful to hear of Gabriel giving orders that Morris should squeeze into the trousers ‘although Hughes was taller … and rather thin’. It was not only the stunning larks but the strain of working hard till the light failed and earning nothing that kept the atmosphere that summer at fever pitch.

  At the end of the long vacation there was no prospect of completion. Hungerford Pollen, who had at first unexpectedly joined in the chaff, coming round at eight in the morning to drag Ned out of bed, returned to Dublin leaving his assignment unfinished, although Miss Smythe had ‘put in’ the Brand Excalibur. Val Prinsep was recalled to London by Mrs Prinsep, who requested Ruskin to fetch him, saying he was learning nothing. Their places were taken, as the term began, by undergraduates who as Hunt acidly says ‘were induced to cover … certain spaces’. Among them was Swinburne, who had come up to Balliol the year before. In November Rossetti perhaps to his own relief, was called away; Elizabeth Siddal was seriously ill in London.

  Morris and Ned moved to new term-time lodgings at 13 George Street, and Ned, still wishing to prove himself, worked doggedly on at the Union. The subject Rossetti had set him was Nimuë Luring Merlin, and his design (in spite of Hunt’s compliments) was, for once, stiff and unsatisfactory – two figures of equal height facing each other across a wall. Spencer Stanhope (Sir Galahad and Three Damsels in the Forest of Arroy) laboured on by his side. ‘As time went on,’ he wrote, ‘I found myself more and more attracted to Ned … he appeared never to leave his picture as long as he thought he could improve it.’ But a string-course ran right through the heads of Nimuë and Merlin, and the brick-interrupted faces were a disaster.

  Morris’s feelings were quite different, because at the end of the long vacation he had met and fallen in love with Jane Burden, the seventeen-year-old daughter of an Oxford stableman. She had been admired in church, introduced by Mr Combe, and was the Guinevere of Rossetti’s design. A little drawing by Rossetti shows Morris diffidently offering her a large ring, over which she bends her dark head and her ‘neck like a tower’. Morris therefore stayed on in George Street for most of the following year, and in the February of 1858, Burne-Jones had to go back to Red Lion Square by himself.

  In appearance he was changed, because, like Morris, he had grown a short beard; the last glimpse of the clean-shaven Ned is the sleeping Lancelot in Rossetti’s Union mural, for which he sat as model. Emotionally, he was suffering a deep reverse after the excitement of the last year. Red Lion Square, it is clear, was never meant to be lived in alone; how little he was in touch with Morris was shown in a letter to Crom Price: ‘Is Topsy in Oxford?’ He painted on the Chaucerian cupboard, though still sickened by the smell of oils. He could not have helped reflecting on the good fortune of Topsy, who would be able to marry when he chose, whereas Ned’s engagement to Georgie had already lasted a year and a half and dragged on in aching unfulfilment. He was behind with Mr Plint’s commission, was worried by letters from home where Mr Jones was ‘in business trouble a good deal’, could not afford to visit the famous Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1875, and had not even the fare home to Birmingham.

  In the early summer of 1858 he fell seriously ill. This was the intensely hot year of the ‘great stink’, when the condition of the Thames sewage at last drove Parliament to legislate, and the combination of marsh fever, loneliness and frustration made Burne-Jones almost too weak to move.

  It is easy to dismiss the constant illnesses of Victorian letter-writers as self-induced, but if we do so we are put to shame by the ready anxiety of the sufferers’ friends. Cures were not expected; an illness at that time was a lifelong companion. Fainting, weakness and nightmares were part of Burne-Jones’s tensely-charged nature: Rossetti called them ‘Ned’s ups and downs’. In this acute ‘down’ he was rescued by the auntly and overwhelming Mrs Prinsep, who carried him off bodily to Little Holland House; her doctor tactfully told her that if she had not intervened it would have been too late.

  The rambling old place in Melbury Road was at the same time a refuge and a centre of eccentric yet stately hospitality. Holman Hunt felt that Mrs Prinsep, surrounded by her sisters, ‘could not but make an Englishman feel proud of his race’. All admired the sheer size of the family, ‘Elgin marbles with dark eyes’, although du Maurier complained that ‘the women offer Tennyson, Browning and Thackeray cups of tea almost kneeling’. Those early days seem to have been a perpetual summer: strawberries came from a Kensington farm, children romped on the lawn, Tennyson read aloud under the trees; Julia Cameron had not yet begun to menace all-comers with her camera, and inside there was quiet in the shadowy rooms, where Watts’s canvases glowed on the walls. Watts had his quarters upstairs in another ‘quaint set of rooms’ (for which, incidentally, he paid rent), and the huge Val Prinsep, who had carried Ned up the ladders when they were both at work at the Union, now carried him up to bed.

  The most telling part of the experience of Burne-Jones was not so much Mrs Prinsep’s kindness, for nearly every woman he met wanted to look after him, but the day-to-day living in a house where nothing was ugly, nothing was saved up to be used again, and beauty was taken for granted. He was, also, in contact with a highly skilled artist, for although Watts was largely self-trained, he had been working since the age of ten and was amiably accustomed to pupils.

  It was here, Burne-Jones said, that he learned that ‘painting is really a trade; the preparation and tools are so important’.3 Watts was at work on the sumptuous Countess Somers, almost life-size, in Venetian rose and ochre and his favourite indigo. Although Watts did not let his pupils copy, the portrait was a lesson in itself on the handling of colour. Meanwhile the real Lady Somers accompanied her sister, Mrs Prinsep, on a call on Georgie; it was a visit of inspection, during which the minister’s family was not daunted.

  Little Holland House, however, could be a dangerous place. We have a description by Ruskin in the Winnington Letters of Ned’s second visit the following sp
ring, with Watts in the drawing-room painting, apparently, in an arm-chair. The atmosphere was one of charged sensibility, with Tennyson shaking like the ‘jarred string of a harp’ as he complained about the recent Moxon edition, illustrated by Rossetti, Millais and Hunt, among others, while Ruskin defended the artist’s right to interpretation. ‘… Behind me, Jones … laughing sweetly at the faults of his school as Tennyson declared them, and glancing at me with half wet half sparkling eyes.’ A day or two later he gives a truly Ruskinian classification of Ned’s smile (as opposed to Watts’s, which seems to have been fairly normal); it is ‘like a piece of sugar candy – he is white and fair … all done in light – the lips hardly smiling at all.’ One’s reaction to this is that Ned must be got out of Little Holland House as soon as possible, and in fact both Rossetti and Morris began to think so. Gabriel believed that the air of Kensington was unhealthy. In an affectionate letter, beginning ‘Dear dear old Ned’,4 his advice is to leave the Prinseps, put the Blessed Damozel aside and start ‘one or two small things’ to sell at once; Plint is used to long delays in any case.

  In September, when Ned emerged from Little Holland House, he found that Morris did not want to return to Red Lion Square at all. While on holiday, rowing down the Seine with Webb and Faulkner, he had worked out plans to build his own house; in fact he had already bought a piece of land at Upton in Kent. Ned perambulated the streets again, and found rooms in what is now Fitzroy Street, but was then 24 Russell Place. So unobtrusively did he go that even Red Lion Mary was not sure of the date.5

  His evenings were sometimes spent at the Hogarth Club, one of the very numerous exhibiting, talking, smoking and mutual-help groups of the gregarious Victorian artist. Madox Brown and Rossetti were on the committee, and Spencer Stanhope and George Boyce were among the members. Boyce’s diaries record a meeting at Red Lion Square, but the club had now moved to 6 Waterloo Place, Burne-Jones, at least, had hoped for a quiet ‘mag’ there in the evenings, but was appalled by the meetings, resolutions and regulations which seemed inseparable from it. He began to realise that he was not a man for public life. The Hogarth, however, was of importance to the forward young spirits at the Academy schools, who were allowed to look in and saw there pictures which were exhibited nowhere else.