After the ten years had passed, Ned received ‘an ill-spelt, ill-written letter from a hostpial patient saying “Sir, I was always obedient to you. I am poor and ill.”’ Such was the rapid decline of the Caiva.
Lower down came the girls from the street, on the verge of prostitution. Ellen Smith, the coffee-house waitress, who, Boyce noted, would leave her purse behind and ‘Rossetti inserts a sovereign’, might be a borderline case; Annie Miller and the ‘strapping Scandinavian’ were certainly not. Neither was the handsome German woman who aroused Ned’s ready sympathy to another attempt at rescue; she was brought home to Russell Place to work as a nursery maid, but ‘difficulties arose’ and the arrangement did not last long. These girls amused Rossetti, who always treated them with politeness. Fanny Cornforth herself, sumptuously blonde and coarsely good-natured, was installed at Cheyne Walk; Burne-Jones was allowed to draw from her, and she appears in Cinderella and Merlin and Nimuë. Another of Ned’s models, a tall dark girl, a stage dancer, was called Reserva; her name was not, as was suggested to her, of ancient gypsy origin, but ‘a freak of Pa’s’, because she had been born by Notting Hill Reservoir.
Burne-Jones also learned from Rossetti the pursuit of the chance-seen face in the street, the passante of Baudelaire, leading to an intense relationship between artist and model, product itself of the great city with its countless dreamers and strugglers through the fog. In this matter Burne-Jones was exacting. His poesias depended on the relationship between the story, the face, and the experience it reflected.
Although Rossetti had returned to oils, Burne-Jones continued to work in water-colour, mixed with various media and used much like oil. The underpainting was in monochrome, flat washes were laid over it, sometimes thickly, sometimes as fine as powder, details were added later, mistakes wiped clean with a rag. Sometimes the underpainting was in gold, sometimes they were gold lights, as though the picture was a precious object for its own sake.
But if the gold suggests the mediaevalising spirit of the early firm, Ned’s idea of colour in the pictures he now began to paint was Venetian, or rather that agreeable thing, mid-Victorian Venetian. It was the natural outcome of his studies in Venice, the example of Watts and the Countess Somers and the dolce stil nuovo of Rossetti who in 1859 had painted an amply Venetian Fanny Cornforth as Bocca Bacciata. Arthur Hughes was also setting out for Venice, where he collected quantities of striped materials and returned to paint his Giorgionesque Music Party. In this atmosphere Burne-Jones designed his Idyll – lovers in dark blue and rose, which Watts bought himself – and the Astrologia, for which Augusta Jones sat; this had a large area of crimson, which Ned liked but found difficult, because ‘you get the beauty of the colour only in the lights’. But reds and blues are also the language of the emotions, and Burne-Jones was working not only on ‘getting it right’ but towards some sort of expressionistic scale of colour. There is a sense of tense anticipation in the leaden colouring of Morgan Le Fay. The lighting of Merlin and Nimuë is extraordinary, a pale gleam of whitish-yellow in the sky and the distant lake just before the darkness advances and hides the death trap to which Merlin advances, his hand on his heart.
These two water-colours of the sixties return to a theme dear to the heart of Burne-Jones, the defence of the enchantress. At Holland House he had implored Tennyson with ‘pained face and eager expostulation’ not to use the name of Nimuë for the harlot of his new Idyll, and Tennyson had ‘good-naturedly changed it to Vivien’. To Burne-Jones the enchantress was neither sinister nor depraved, but an aspect of the weakness of man. There are only two kinds of women, he said, those who take the strength out of a man and those who put it back; but the destructive ones are outside blame, since they are acting only in accordance with their nature.
Of all these pictures, however, the most attractive are the ‘Rose’ variations which are the direct expression of the happiness of his early married life. The trellis which appears in them, the Chaucerian garden close, is taken from the trellis at the Red House, as is Morris’s own trellis wallpaper. Fair Rosamund is Georgie in tea-rose colour, against roses, holding a rose. This portrait touched with gold brings out the soul of the flower and indeed of the bud, where, according to Ruskin, ‘all these proceedings on the flower’s part are imagined’; it is the Rosamund of Ned’s dream at Godstow, in opposition to Swinburne’s version. In the Rose Garden Georgie stands again against the trellis, in a pose that suggests Luini’s Madonna and child with a rose hedge in the Brera. With her left hand, as though looking for reassurance, she clasps the end of her leather belt tightly. The canvas of the rose garden has an arched top, echoing the full-blown flowers and Georgie’s round head; the feeling is of unclouded happiness. Georgie herself calls it the ‘Rosamund time’.
‘My little early ones didn’t give me the shock I expected,’ Burne-Jones said after an exhibition of 1896. ‘There was such a passion to express in them and so little ability to do it. They were like earnest passionate stammerings.’ When Ruskin returned from Switzerland early in 1863, he found that his father had bought Fair Rosamund. This was partly in atonement for his suspicions of the ‘low’ Mr Jones; ‘… and after my eye had dwelt on the canvases and paper of the first names of the century I am happy to say my evening contemplation of Rosamund yields me the greater satisfaction.’ But, as his letter shows, he also had a chivalrous respect for the original. At the stuffy dinner table at Denmark Hill, where the young Joneses had paid two visits, he had made a true estimate of Georgie’s worth.
Ned’s work for the firm at the time included the long series of Lyndhurst windows – Georgie posing for some of the music-making angels – and he seems to have been partly paid in thirty yards of red serge and a pair of brass candlesticks, so that Russell Square gradually grew to look furnished. He attended the meetings of the firm regularly – indeed, on Christmas Eve 1862, he and Charlie Faulkner were the only two who turned up. But although church windows could fairly be called public work, he was anxious to reach a wider audience; if only it were possible, he wrote to Louie (still faithfully practising her drawing), to publish ‘100,000 wood-cuts as big as Death the Friend or bigger’. These would reach the countless thousands whose childhood had been without beauty.
The most obvious way for an artist to do this in the 1860s was through the magazines, but Ned was cautious about illustrations as he had been about writing ‘tales’, dreading the temptation to spend too much time on it – the fate which lay ahead of George du Maurier. In 1862, however, he could hardly afford to turn down anything, and he accepted a few commissions from publishers. From the point of view of his development these illustrations are puzzling. The Nativity in Mrs Gatty’s Parables from Nature is a poorish imitation of Rossetti, while the Two Lovers Meeting (Good Words, October 1862) is a fine vertical design which only Burne-Jones could have drawn.
Good Words was published by the brothers William and George Dalziel, who in 1863 were projecting an illustrated Bible, with the work farmed out among bright young artists, Burne-Jones among them: something to rival the Lane Arabian Nights or the Moxon Tennyson. The Bible, as the Dalziels engagingly point out in their Record of Fifty Years, was a ‘dead failure’. Writing to the Dalziels in 1880, Ned recalled the difficulties of the whole undertaking, Watts refusing to do ‘mere costume pictures’ and wanting ‘abstract designs from Job and Ezekiel’ most unacceptable to pious readers, while Sandys was furious about his proofs (though the Dalziels were used to that). A very interesting rough for an illustration by Burne-Jones survives in the Victoria and Albert, a Return of the Dove to the Ark, with the flood-water paved with drowning faces. But Ned implored them not to use his old designs in their Bible Gallery (1880) and offered to substitute new ones, otherwise ‘I shall feel a constant shame whenever the word Bible is mentioned – which must be a distressing reflection’.3
The negotiations in 1862 led to a visit from the Dalziels, who looked round the studio and commissioned two water-colours, a Nativity and an Annunciation. Although they ho
ped these might come in handy as Bible engravings, they were principally attracted by the colour. The scarlet and crimson bedroom of their Annunciation recalls Carpaccio’s St Ursula; Rio’s Christian Art, it may be remembered, described visitors as falling into ecstasy before the picture of the saint’s bedroom, and without going as far as this Ned had studied it scrupulously, trying in vain to recommend Carpaccio in his letters to the still obdurate Ruskin.
In 1863 Ruskin brought, on one of his calls to Great Russell Street, a high-minded, middle-aged ‘brisk she-shape’, Miss Margaret Bell, the headmistress of Winnington Hall girls’ school in Cheshire. Ruskin, to her gratification, had paid several visits, and she now invited the young Joneses to accompany him.
Georgie comments shrewdly on the atmosphere of Winnington, where Miss Bell, relentlessly talkative on all subjects, was evidently cultivating Ruskin; on the other hand, she generously praises the charm of the young girls, and the fact that Ruskin was happy there. And happy he was, reading, dancing, romping and teasing with them, preferring always, as he tells us in Praeterita, ‘oval faces, crystalline blonde, with straightish hair, the form elastic, and foot firm’. Ned, though less serious, was even more susceptible; taking turns with Ruskin at reading aloud, he was soon ‘helplessly in love with several at the same time’. According to himself, he even played cricket with them.
At Winnington he worked hard on his Legend of Good Women. This was a point where his imagination drew close to that of Chaucer who, with late mediaeval ‘pity’, includes Medea, Circe, Dido and the injured Phyllis among his good women, not as seducers but as the martyrs of love. Versions of the series had appeared on tiles for the firm and were used later as window designs for Peterhouse, Cambridge, made at ‘the unremunerative price of £3 each’. This set, however, was for tapestry embroideries to be worked by the Winnington girls – in fact in a sense they were the girls, since they were to have the blonde oval faces of Ruskin’s favourites. Ruskin was inclined to think the panel of Chaucer himself a waste of time – Ned must get on with more ‘pets’. With these absurdities he tried to stave off the melancholia which was beginning to threaten his reason.
So great was the happiness at Red House that something like it, the Jonses felt, must be of help to Ruskin, and the tapestries were intended for a house which in the end he never built. Ned suggested Herefordshire – he had never forgotten his first sight of the cathedral; Ruskin was negotiating for land in the Haute Savoie. ‘Tell Mr Jones I think I know enough of him not to be jealous of any influence he may have with my son,’ wrote old Mr Ruskin to Georgie, in strong disapproval of the scheme. But all ideas of the house and its decoration were put aside when, during the Joneses’ second visit to Winnington in the spring of 1864, the old man suddenly died. Ruskin returned to Denmark Hill to become, as he said, a ‘child of darkness’. Steely Mrs Ruskin did not, in her grief, relax the restrictions she put on her son; his pictures were still covered on the Sabbath so that he should not enjoy them too much. ‘May we come back presently? Georgie would love to be hours and hours with your mother, and would never tire of reading to her,’ Ned wrote, rather recklessly, in his distress.
Ruskin had wanted to take them to Florence again that spring, but this too was now out of the question. Ned, in any case, hardly felt that he had earned a second visit, and Georgie had Philip, already a restless child, to look after. Back in London, they found Rossetti genially installed at Cheyne Walk, while at Red Lion Square Morris and Faulkner were keeping the firm’s head above water; in spite of its early success it suffered from lack of capital and ‘had to be guided’, as Mackail says, ‘by the exigencies of the moment’. At Great Russell Street, du Maurier with his new wife was now a close neighbour, and Georgie recalled how she and Emma du Maurier had once meant to engrave their husbands’ work and struggled on together with their woodcutting lessons until Emma cut herself severely.
Although the Dalziels’s Annunciation was finished, Burne-Jones asked if he might keep it in the studio, ‘as I do not exhibit, and that is my only way of letting people know what I am doing’. But in the spring of 1864 his career took a new turn when Ruskin put his name forward for the second time as an Associate of the Royal Water-Colour Society. The election had gone through on 8 February, and old Mrs Ruskin’s last letter to Georgie had been one of congratulation ‘for latterly there appears very great difficulty in obtaining admission’. This was a step which Rossetti had refused to take, but Burne-Jones, with equal resolution, set his will to it. The real battle, as Manet was reminding Degas at this very time, was in the salon.
He therefore wrote again to the Dalziels for permission to show the Annunciation. Ruskin would lend Fair Rosamund, and Cinderella was also ready. The fourth canvas was The Merciful Knight, something so odd and distinctive that even the faithful Stephens could only say that it was ‘amenable to its own laws’. The subject was taken from the Broadstone of Honour; the image of Christ in a wayside shrine leans down to kiss a knight who has forgiven his brothers’ murderer. Ned used the forest background approved by Rossetti when he tore up his own drawings in the Sloane Street lodgings; to these he added the familiar rose trellis from the Red House and marigolds, the flowers of suffering, which grew thickly in Russell Square as they will in most London gardens. The composition of the picure on two flat planes recalls Rossetti’s design for the Moxon Tennyson, Sir Galahad at the Ruined Chapel, but the central point is the concentration of expression in the two faces. The Christ is still in physical pain, or perhaps has taken it on Himself; the knight is white as death. One might, like the Heir of Redclyffe, ‘envy him such an opportunity of sacrifice’ or one might consider it morbid nonsense. Burne-Jones knew this perfectly well, but he was determined to submit it with the others to the formidable judgement of the society.
Long before we saw The Merciful Knight, however, the committee’s doubts were aroused. This became clear when Ned entered the Society’s rooms at 5 Pall Mall East to be received as an Associate. The custom was for the committee to rise and shake the newcomer by the hand, but on this occasion two members refused to do so.4 One of them was ‘Old Duncan’, the marine painter, just turned sixty, who was to live another twenty years and die unforgiving of young Jones.
The Royal (or Old) Water-Colour Society was already felt to be a venerable institution, having been founded in a small way in 1805. It was proud of its achievements in establishing a genuinely English form of art, which could only be brought to perfection in genuinely English weather. This art had from its early days been associated with the country seats, views and ruins whose proprietors were also the purchasers of the pictures. De Wint had told dealers that ‘he only made drawings for gentlemen’. Water-colour, for all its skill and delicacy, was a field exercise. ‘Rheumatism, and very shaky legs, bunions and foggy eyesight, take the sketching pluck out of one,’ wrote ‘old Duncan’, in the last year of his life, adding that he was ‘an old hulk’ who must die quietly at moorings. The English technique was a source of pride, attracting foreign artists, such as Carl Haag, to settle over here and learn its secrets. ‘It was in the use of transparent water-colour that it found its strength, and acquired its celebrity,’ says J.L. Roget, the historian of the Society. How to do it could be taught easily enough – the members were entitled to charge a guinea a lesson, and six lessons were enough to produce an adequately skilled amateur – but the boldness of a true master could not be learned in a lifetime.
Thirty years earlier, in 1832, the Society had received a distinct check when the New Water-Colour Society started a salon libre at 16 Old Bond Street, alleging that the O.W.S. was ‘exclusive in the narrowest degree’ and rejected fine draughtsmen simply because they hadn’t ‘the mere slip-slop character of water-colour painters’. This opposition was probably the reason why the O.W.S. began its winter exhibitions of drawings, but the N.W.S. could not be pacified. In 1862 they led the way in an exhibition for the relief of the Lancashire mill workers, gravely affected by the shortage of American cotton. It was to
this that Burne-Jones had sent his Chess Players, and while the show attracted some publicity, nobody noticed the O.W.S. contribution of £277 12s, raised from a whip-round of the members.
It may be imagined that there was little collaboration between the two societies. In 1858–9, when the government planned to share out the space in Burlington House between the Arts and Sciences, neither of them obtained a gallery, a failure which lay partly at the door of the O.W.S. President, Fred Tayler. Tayler, whose comment on the matter was ‘how this is to be achieved, or whether this is the fitting moment, probably opens a wide field of discussion’, was the weak genial man preferred by a strong committee. He remained in office from 1858 – when he was already fifty-six – to 1871, and much against his will (for he preferred doing nothing) was to play a decisive part in Ned’s life.
But however confident they felt of defying the dissidents of Bond Street, the Society felt the threat of change. De Wint had died in 1849, David Cox in 1859, Prout (old Mr Ruskin’s favourite) also in 1859, of apoplexy and ‘Bird’s Nest’ Hunt in 1864. There was a closing of the ranks, and Burne-Jones knew that his exhibits would be received with hostility. He described to Rooke the ‘sheer depressingness’ of the Committee and the murmur which arose from them of ‘when David Cox, Sir, was among us …’5 This hostility had several distinct causes. The society constituted themselves guardians of artistic integrity (pure colour), public morality (nothing morbid, nothing sensual) and a threatened social order. Burne-Jones, with his inadequate training, seemed to them hardly professional, and as a young man absurdly set in his own ideas. Probably only Ruskin’s support got him through the first year.
Many of the members still felt a water-colour should be painted with water, although body-colour had always been admitted and ‘Bird’s Nest’ Hunt had scraped away the lights, his maxim being to ‘fudge it out’. Fred Walker, elected at the same time as Burne-Jones, scraped and used gum medium. But the pictures Ned was submitting were on paper completely saturated with colour, touched with gold and, in the drapery passages, as thickly laid on as oils. The strongest objection, however, was to the subject. The O.W.S. catalogue for 1864 includes Mrs Criddle’s I Canna Mind My Wheel, A Fair Student and The Angel’s Whisper; The Mischievous Pet by Alfred D. Fripp and Briton Rivière’s Stray Kitten. The mainstay was Welsh and Italian scenery and Birket Foster’s reliable drinking cattle. But the mention of Foster is a reminder that the exhibition itself was a fine one, and Fred Walker, for his debut as Associate, was showing his miraculous Spring. Among Ned’s offerings, Cinderella, in spite of its high colour, would ‘pass’ – in fact another Cinderella, by Elizabeth Sharpe, was shown that year. The picture that stuck in the committee’s throats was The Merciful Knight.
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