Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Although Rossetti tended to laugh at the red brick and told Webb that architects were ‘only tradesmen’, he too was expansive and genial. In their seasons the apples and roses came, and in their season came three pregnancies: Lizzie Rossetti, Janey Morris and Georgie Jones were all expecting babies in 1861.

  As a matter of necessity, the Burne-Joneses moved into a larger set of rooms at 62 Great Russell Street. Ned, however, now had the prospect of plenty of work, for in the spring the firm of Morris Marshall, Faulkner & Co. had opened business. Boyce’s diary records that he took his ‘future’, Miss Subeiron, for a musical evening at Russell Square (26 January 1861) and ‘[Jones] talked of a kind of shop where they would jointly produce and sell painted furniture’. The ‘shop’ opened at 8 Red Lion Square, where a basement was rented for workshops and a tile and pottery kiln. Charlie Faulkner acted as book-keeper, and Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Madox Brown and Philip Webb were the other original members. The firm was created partly for practical reasons – Morris needed to make more money – partly for emotional ones, to prolong the joy in shared work which they all felt at the Red House; and partly on principle, to realise Ruskin’s attack in The Stones of Venice on ‘servile ornament’ and to bring into the Victorian revival of the useful arts the spirit of the mediaeval workshop. In this spirit everyone lent a hand. Georgie quietly put aside her attempts at wood-engraving and began to paint tiles, Janey supervised the embroidery, and a foreman, George Campfield, was found at the Working Men’s College.

  A call of £1 per share was made upon the partners, but Burne-Jones earned his contribution back immediately with four tile designs at five shillings each and he received five shillings for attendance at each meeting. For the first time he began to keep accounts, in two little parchment-bound notebooks. Though they are not always accurate, and not always added up right, they record one side of his life from 1861 until 1897, the year before his death. They begin with a pen-and-ink drawing of Morris resplendent as Judas in a stained-glass window, while on the opposite page a thin Burne-Jones stands on a barrel-shaped Morris in the gutter. Throughout the notebooks Ned complains, in the margin, of poor payment and overwork, of Morris’s unreasonable conduct, of his pretended stinginess and real fondness for a glass, or several glasses, of good wine. The two friends are playing out the comic rôles which they had fallen into almost as soon as they met. Then, with Morris’s death, all jokes cease.

  ‘We have many commissions’, Ned wrote to Crom Price, who was now trying his luck as a tutor in Russia, ‘and shall probably roll in yellow carriages by the time you come back.’ There was nothing amateur about the firm, even if it was experimental. They were up against stiff competition: the public were used to Burges’s solid furniture and the designs of Owen Jones and Butterfield; the South Kensington Exhibition of 1862 would provide a testing ground which might mean their failure or success. As a show piece for this they collaborated on what Ned’s workbook calls ‘painted gold cabinet for Seddon’ – the King René cabinet – and this panel, which also exists in a water-colour and a stained-glass version, is as sumptuous in its red, gold and grass-green as the other two, by Rossetti and Madox Brown. His earnings at the beginning were certainly not high: he got £8 for the Virgin and Child and Seven Angels Playing Bells for Kentish Town church, and the same rate for a window for Frederick Leighton, one of the firm’s earliest patrons. Burne-Jones’s transactions are made more difficult by his treating the firm as a bank for drawing cash, but he certainly finished the year 1861 £5 in debt.

  ‘My dear Ned, Lizzie has just had a dead baby,’ Rossetti wrote on 2 May, entrusting him with the task of telling ‘Top and all’. In the short time that was left to her, poor Lizzie tried to adopt an eight-year-old girl, while Gabriel had to prevent her from giving away ‘a certain small wardrobe’ to the Joneses. When they went to see her for the first time after her recovery she was sitting on a nursing chair by the empty cradle, and looking up, said, ‘Hush, Ned, you’ll wake it.’ With this prelude the twenty-year-old Georgie, without any of her sisters or her mother within call, began to prepare for her own confinement in the autumn.

  During the summer, too, Ned could not always be with her; he was occasionally away from home, in camp with the Artists’ Corps of volunteers which he had joined, with Morris and Rossetti, during the invasion scare of 1859. This was the occasion of Boyd Houghton’s delightful Volunteers in Hyde Park, and Tennyson’s Riflemen, Form! ‘Review’ subjects became so common that Frith decided not to paint one, although it was suggested to him that he might put a fat woman in the foreground of the picture being hit in the eye by a ginger-beer cork. The Working Men’s College voted to volunteer, but not to drill on Sundays.

  Most of the stories of artists on duty come from W.B. Richmond. Leighton, of course, was in command, speaking many languages fluently, and Watts made an unexpected appearance on horseback, his silky beard blowing in the wind. Simeon Solomon is said to have been unwilling to take the oath, substituting ‘Drat it!’ Burne-Jones, on the other hand, with more capacity for obedience than Morris or Rossetti, and much more than Solomon, made ‘a pretty good soldier’.5

  The early success of the firm (which surprised Arthur Hughes, who had ‘rather despaired of its establishment’) was in every way fortunate, since Burne-Jones now lost a good private patron. On 13 July Mr Plint died – of ‘increased breathlessness’, according to the Leeds Mercury – leaving his affairs in some confusion. Kindly Mr Plint’s love of pictures had outrun his discretion, but his executors were not so kindly, and Madox Brown and Rossetti were both caught short on their commissions. Burne-Jones solved the difficulty ingeniously, since he had on his hands a triptych of the Adoration, painted for St Paul’s, Brighton. His name had been suggested by the architect (and organist) of the church, G.F. Bodley, who had admired Ned’s drawings of poppies made in the early morning at Red House. The triptych was finished, with Janey as the Virgin and Morris, Swinburne, Ned himself and ‘a black-haired organ-grinder’ among the shepherds and kings. It was, however, difficult to read at a distance, and Burne-Jones produced an altered version on a gold background; this went down to Brighton, and Plint’s executors accepted the first one.

  The picture had a curious history, and the man who bought it from the executors shot himself. This is probably the patron who, Burne-Jones told Rooke, took him for a drive in a cab and told him that ‘he was always thinking about women, he never remembered an hour in which – whatever he might be engaged in – they were not his main thought and everything else an outer shadow. This man had a nice wife, a house and family. The next day he committed suicide.’6 The next purchaser poisoned himself, and it finally came back to Bodley himself from a builder who had bought it for £7 as an ‘old Italian picture’.

  In the October 1861 a son, Philip, was born to Ned and Georgie. Neither the doctor nor the midwife arrived in time, and Ned, who had never delivered so much as a kitten, had to do what he could until reliable Nurse Wheeler (who had attended Lizzie) arrived, and found him in worse case than the baby. His remark ‘children and pictures are too important to be produced by one man’, dates from this moment, when he realised that he would have a family to paint for and a new bond of love which must at times be a source of pain.

  The godfathers, by proxy, were Rossetti and Ruskin. Both had every generous intention, but neither remembered to send the customary gift, until old Mrs Ruskin heard of it and indignantly sent off a silver knife, spoon and fork.

  Ned’s health did not pick up that winter, and Ruskin, returning from abroad, was dissatisfied with the conditions of ‘my dear children’. ‘Jones, who promised to be the sweetest of all the P.R.B. designers, has just been attacked by spitting of blood, and I fear, dangerously’, he wrote to Norton on 19 January 1862. Fortunately Dr Radcliffe, who like all Burne-Jones’s doctors became a collector of his work, pronounced that the blood was not from the lungs but the throat. Ned next had to meet a call on the partners of the firm for a new £19 share which Morris, though h
e managed with amazingly little capital, felt obliged to make. Conditions were certainly not easy for the young mother who knew nothing about new babies and the young husband struggling with large cartoons laid out on brown paper in the next room. They lived from day to day, and the disadvantages of romanticism appeared when Ned incautiously looked in a shop window and seeing a watch set with sparklers which he knew that Georgie must have, spent what was nearly their last £8 in the world. The Dalziel brothers, brought to the so-called studio by Holman Hunt, found it ‘crowded with works’, but a passing reference in the Memorials to Ned sitting down on a February morning to ‘such work as the light permitted’ suggests that he was economising even on candles.

  That same dark February morning brought the news that Lizzie Siddal had swallowed an overdose of laudanum. Georgie would not let Ned go out, but hurried with Red Lion Mary to Chatham Place to see her lying dead on the bed, at peace after a terrible night of stomach pumping and hopeless consultations. This sight, which remained an ‘ambush at the heart’ for Rossetti and for Georgie herself, was followed by the serious illness of the Joneses’ own four-month-old Philip. The baby recovered, but the young parents were exhausted, and Ruskin, who had been waiting for the right time to offer help, pressed them to come to Italy, a plan he had already put forward several times.

  They were to be his guests, but Ruskin was sincere in declaring that he needed their company as much as they needed the journey. Ruskin was deeply concerned with the need to make records of Italian works of art which he saw perishing in all directions through ignorance and decay. With daguerreotypes and photographs, with his own drawings and those of numerous assistants (he sometimes took his pupils from the Working Men’s College with him), he struggled to perpetuate ‘the lovely things that are also necessary’. Ned would help him by making sketches, in particular for Ruskin’s studies of Bernardino Luini for the Arundel Society. But there were darker and nobler passages in Ruskin’s mind, particularly in that side of him which, as he wrote to Norton in 1858, was tormented by wanting ‘to get everybody a dinner who hasn’t got one’. He had just signed the preface of Unto This Last, his noble attack upon laissezfaire, which had already aroused bitter objections when it appeared in the Cornhill and had deeply wounded his own father. He hoped to find solace in the company of the ‘dear children’.

  The atmosphere was at first that of a great treat, and the young Joneses still called their friend ‘Mr Ruskin’. The Macdonalds offered to look after the baby, Aggie came to fetch it, and on 15 May 1862 they sailed from Folkestone. They were to go straight from Paris through the St Gothard pass to Milan, where Ruskin wanted to copy the Luini St Catherine himself.

  To travel with Ruskin was an experience which he himself looks back upon, in Praeterita, with nostalgia. He scorned trains and those who ‘let themselves be dragged about like cattle, or felled timber, through the country they are visiting’. Instead, he sent over a hired private carriage fitted for luggage and sketching materials. Dinner was always served in a private room, and sacristans and conservatori hastened to open their treasures to Ruskin. The young Joneses, after months of worry, were overawed and grateful, but they soon realised that their host was to be pitied. One of the self-torturing objects of his journey was to call on Adèle Domecq, the wine-merchant’s daughter who had first broken his heart; in fact Ruskin, who himself admired Byron so much, appeared to the wondering eyes of the Joneses, as he threw himself on to the sofa, as a Byronic figure. This, to be sure, was tempered by his sending a letter or a telegram to his parents on every day of his travels. Under his protection they visited the Louvre, crossed the Alps and reached Milan, but then, by arrangement, they went on alone with a long list of works to be copied. The first of these were the Giotto frescoes at the Arena Chapel, a revelation to Burne-Jones, who had been told to make drawings from the Virtues and Vices. Then they went on to Venice.

  My dear Gabriel,7 Ned wrote on the 10th of June, … I have thought about you constantly and hoped you were happyish. I could sit and write a regular love-letter to you now! … It is only 5 weeks since we left but it seems such a long time that so much must have happened and I hear nothing about you … Venice [is] simple heaven, except when there’s a hell of a stink enough to stifle you, but away it goes, and everything is as sweet as ever – you must come and see it someday before it is quite ruined. Georgie and I are alone in a vast hotel, and dine alone at a table for fifty … We are happy enough on the days when I am all right … we are perishing though for home news … except one very large [letter] from Top, weighing a 100 weight and positively having 20 shillings stamp on it, all tracing paper for windows and not a word – stern business only …

  This fairly expresses the homesickness and awkwardness of the young couple, made worse in Ned’s case by a touch of malaria. ‘We are enjoying ourselves intensely,’ he wrote at the same time to Ruskin. ‘I am at work on a little head of Paolo in the Ducal Palace.’ He struggled with details of Veronese, Bonifazio, and Tintoretto. The effect on him was dissatisfaction and a longing to start on his own work again. ‘One could do a dozen designs for one little worthless copy,’ he told Ruskin, ‘but oh, it does one good.’

  From Geneva, Ruskin wrote a remarkable letter to his father. Old Mr Ruskin (like old Mrs Morris) was doubtful of the influence of this new friend, who was certainly poor, and probably ‘low’. To this Ruskin returned a passionate attack on snobbery, requesting his father to:

  ask Jones out to any quiet dinner … ask him anything you want to know about mediaeval history – and try to forget that he is poor. I wish you to do this, observe, entirely for your own sake – that you may have the pleasure of knowing your son’s real friends, and one of the most richly gifted, naturally, of modern painters.

  The tracing papers sent out by Morris were probably for the designs for four of the stained glass panels at Harden Grange. Burne-Jones was well aware of his responsibilities to the firm, but on his return, after ten weeks away, he felt a new kind of creative vigour. ‘Directly my eyes close a canvas appears and I scrawl away with brown and white – yes, dark figures on a white ground, that’s the secret; you have done me so much good by giving me a chance to see the old miracles.’ The Venetians in particular were a miracle, and, of course, Luini. Compared with Luini, Ruskin said, Leonardo did ‘but stained drawings’, and Burne-Jones, at this stage, agreed with him. Indeed, the endless series of round-faced babies which he began to draw as soon as his own were born were always called, in the family, ‘Luini kids’.

  Ned found Morris and Janey, with another daughter born to them now, thriving among the apple trees. The firm had had two stalls at the 1862 Exhibition and, in spite of his long absence, Ned earned £99 10s this year from window and tile designs. These included the Cinderella and the Beauty and the Beast tiles, all fired, after a process of trial and error, in the basement at Red Lion Square. The Sleeping Beauty set returns to the favourite theme which he had drawn with Louie, in a guileless fairytelling style, with drowsy cooks and dropped ladles. The tiles were painted in blue, yellow, olive-green and violet slip by Charlie Faulkner’s two sisters, Kate and Lucy; they were commissioned for the overmantels of Birket Foster’s new house at Witley.

  Meanwhile Rossetti, somewhat recovered from Lizzie’s death, was moving into a large old riverside house, No. 16 Cheyne Walk. He began to go out. Ned was summoned to accompany him, and with Whistler and Boyce they called on Swinburne at his Dorset Street lodgings, bringing willow-pattern plates ‘as a contribution to his housekeeping’. The old comradeship, after so much suffering, was renewed, and Burne-Jones naturally turned to Rossetti’s studio to start painting in earnest, as it seemed to him, for the first time.

  7

  1863–5

  GREEN SUMMER: A SEASON OF HAPPINESS

  By 1863 Burne-Jones knew that his metaphor as a painter must be the human image, and he set himself seriously to learn to draw from life. Though he sometimes borrowed a lay figure from Gabriel – Georgie and he were once stra
nded outside a public-house with it when they were trying to take it home in a cab – he now entered with much more confidence into the world of models.

  The best male models were Italians. Only the genre painters relied on English ones – drunks, old soldiers, old actors who ‘did the expressions’. Alessandro di Marco, superb among the Italians, who ‘seemed to stride out from Signorelli’s grand frescoes’, was an organ grinder. Gaetano Meo, Greek by origin, Sicilian in temperament, the Nostromo of the studios, adept at everything, was found by Simeon Solomon playing a harp in the streets. Meo declared that in Paris artists dined with their models and treated them as human beings – not so in London. Burne-Jones and Rossetti, however, were exceptions.

  The women might be divided into three groups. At the top were professionals like the ‘inexorable’ Miss Silver and the superb Augusta Jones (later Johnson) who gave definite appointments which could not be trifled with. ‘In those days’, Ned told Rooke, ‘I had a model who used to write, “Sir, you are competent to elect Wednesday; or Friday next week.” She had an old lover, and her stories used to make me sick.’1 But her dignity was no doubt preserved, and these ladies made their own terms; at the Academy schools the male students were not allowed to leave their places during the life class. Mrs Keene and her daughter Bessie were delightful and pious women who sat for Burne-Jones through two decades. Antonia Caiva, the finest of his nude models,

  was of the city of Basilicata. She was like Eve and Semiramis, but if she had a mind at all, which I always doubted, it had no ideas. She had splendour and solemnity: her glory lasted nearly ten years.2