Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  There remained the important question of the approval of Ruskin.

  Ruskin had never ceased to be in close sympathy with Burne-Jones, the only person, ‘with the exception of two women, of whom I never see the only one I care for’, who had shown him true understanding. In 1868 he had written from Venice to tell him that he was right, after all, about Carpaccio. In 1870 he had been abroad for three months and had missed the O.W.S. exhbition; in August he had written a benevolent birthday letter to Ned, sending him ‘a little bit of eatable thing’. He was in seclusion, preparing the lectures on the Elements of Sculpture which, as Slade Professor, he would deliver at Oxford in the Michaelmas Term. In September, however, he suddenly sent for Ned – there is no other word for it – to come to him at Denmark Hill and listen to what he had written: a paper on The Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret. Ned heard with growing distress a violent attack on Michaelangelo, whose Sacra Famiglia, as he knew, had first drawn Ruskin towards Italian art. Now Ruskin spoke of the painter’s ‘dark carnality’, his poor draughtsmanship, fading colours, and the perverted imagination which substitutes ‘the flesh of man for the spirit’. The lecture was intended as a serious piece of didactic art history, but Ruskin was a great Romantic and would never have denied that all his opinions were opinions of the heart. Ned could hardly doubt that the Professor had learned from some source or other – possibly from Howell – of the crisis in his marriage and had related it to the Michaelangelesque drawing of the naked Demophoön. It was a reproof to his life through his painting, and Ruskin, in his own way, seemed to have deserted him as surely as the Old Water-Colour Society. ‘He read it to me just after he had written it, and as I went home I wanted to drown myself in the Surrey Canal or get drunk in a tavern – it didn’t seem worth while to strive any more if he could think it and write it.’

  Georgie had returned, with children, buckets and shrimping nets, to The Grange. She set herself determinedly to study organ music and to learn Latin with a refugee scholar, Andrieu. ‘People don’t really want to die of mental pain,’ Morris wrote to his wife (2 October 1870), ‘they want to see the play played out.’ Burne-Jones, seeing himself disapproved of even where he was most loved, was entering upon what he himself was to call ‘the desolate years’.

  11

  1870–6

  THE DESOLATE YEARS

  Burne-Jones, however, described these ‘desolate years’ to Rooke as the ‘blissfullest years of work I ever had’. There was truth in both these remarks. Although he had vindicated his independence – a most important matter – he might well feel his resignation as a defeat in the attack on the world which Morris and he had launched together more than ten years ago on the quay at Le Havre. He had not justified himself either at Birmingham, where old Mr Jones, well satisfied with his son’s progress so far, might now shake his head again. Gillott, the steel-pen maker (‘the best of everything is good enough for me’), died in 1872, and his collection of ‘safe’ pictures was sold for £164,000; Ned’s pictures were no longer safe. After a fair start as a painter, he had to go back into obscurity. He lost a number of patrons, and although Ionides did not desert him, it seems likely that Burne-Jones is meant when ‘Ion’ tells us that ‘[Mary] had several affaires de coeur; one of them was with an intimate friend of my father, who, disapproving, hurled some thunder right and left, and brought her back. But the friendship between the two men was never the same again.’ In addition to this, Howell had damaged him a good deal financially; he was in an awkward position at home, where Georgie (as Rudyard Kipling described her) was never angry, but only sad; he had to fight against a feeling that as a painter he was a lonely and unwanted eccentric. And his genuinely modest nature, exposed to public comment and criticism, shrank away into itself so far that for the time being he found it impossible to meet new people.

  On the other hand, Burne-Jones could not altogether regret what had happened. ‘I have been a bad man and am sorry for it’, he wrote to Olive Maxse, ‘but not sorry enough to try to be a good one.’1 In the face of the official world of art he had maintained that hand should paint soul, even if the soul appeared as a naked body. Leyland and Graham did not desert him, his friendship with Morris survived the strain of 1869–70 and was stronger than ever. Moreover he had loyal assistants and a devoted family and he was able to develop, without regard to exhibition dates, his distinctive mature style which required slow, sophisticated and patient work. Lastly, it is hard to know whether one should describe as desolate or blissful the fact that he fell in love again.

  His appearance on entering the next decade was faithfully recorded by Watts, who had finished the familiar portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery, and had sent it up from the Prinseps’ house in Brighton in 1870. Georgie approved of it, so we must take it that the dreaming eyes and long faint beard (Watts thought this the hardest part of the portrait) are her idea of Ned. ‘What a blessed thing is painting’, he wrote to Watts, ‘for now I have a red beard for ever.’2 Georgie herself had been painted by her brother-in-law Poynter during one of her long visits away in 1869. In this delightful but uncharacteristic portrait, she holds an elegant china teacup and has her hair arranged ‘in curly wise’, to the dismay of the Howards, who had commissioned it.3

  Georgie observed in the Memorials that ‘Edward and Morris, having flagged together, took heart together at the same time’. The firm’s production of stained glass, however, did not flag at all, and Burne-Jones designed among other things the magnificent Corporal Mercies and six other windows for Brighouse, although nothing is dated in his account book until 14 December. Cartoons he could manage even when he was ‘dull and stupid’. As to the emotional situation, both Ned and Morris were beginning to find it intolerable, though their solutions were different. At the beginning of 1871 Morris had discovered his manor house at Kelmscott, but the lease was to be shared with Rossetti. It was agreed that country air would benefit Gabriel’s health, and Janey did not appear to be disturbed at having to share the house with him while her husband was busy or away. In July Morris exploded into action, and set off, with Charlie Faulkner, on an expedition to Iceland. This enthusiasm for the ‘barren land, populous with ravens’ dismayed Burne-Jones. ‘Mr Morris tried to persuade me not to like the south,’ he told Rooke. But he himself began to pine for Italy.

  The impulse to go south was partly the result of a present which the tactful Norton, puzzled by the quarrel with Ruskin, had sent before he left for America. This was a small panel from his own collection, which Ned had had cleaned by an expert he knew at the National Gallery, when it emerged as Europa and the Bull, a brown bull and a Europa in sumptuous orange pink. It is attributed now to Palma Vecchio, but to Norton and Ned it was a Giorgione, and as Graham Robertson said, Giorgione was a painter and must have painted something, so why not this Europa? In a letter of thanks which is at times alarmingly whimsical – this being one of the defences he was beginning to put up against deep feeling – Ned begged Norton for more photographs and engravings. Mantegnas he wanted if possible, ‘nakeds by Leonardo and M. Angelo and Raphael’, and ‘if Ghirlandajo draws sweet girls running, and their dresses blown about, O please let me not lose one’.

  His account book entry for 24 October 1870, ‘9/- to Wilday [one of the firm’s workmen] to Mrs Zambaco’, must have been a studio errand, and Mary was still sitting for him; indeed the profile drawing for the second version of the Hesperides, which he began this year, is one of the most delicate he ever did. The stories he associated with her were still expectation, disappointment and anguish. He drew her as Cassandra and painted her as Ariadne (both these were for the ‘Duchess’). Even the Hesperides, in Morris’s Earthly Paradise version, are left silent, ‘craving kindness, hope, or loving care’ when the golden apples are stolen. Summer, part of Leyland’s set of the Four Seasons and described by Malcolm Bell as ‘a graceful figure, in a thin white semi-transparent robe’, is also Mary; for this likeness of her Morris wrote the couplet.

  Deares
t, take it not amiss

  Though I weary thee with bliss.

  The naked Venus Epithalamia, bought by Marie Spartali (now Mrs Stillman), again has Mary’s sad face.

  Work continued to be what Morris called it, the faithful daily companion, during the long drawn-out tormenting end of the relationship. Ned had to contend, also, with vexatious ‘Howell matters’ which continued to come to light for another twenty years. There were pictures which Howell apparently made away with,4 red chalk heads copied by Fairfax Murray which he sold as originals,5 and actual forgeries made by Howell’s mistress, Rosa Corder.6 Howell also tried to extract money out of Luke Ionides by selling him drawings which Burne-Jones had intended as a present, ‘and the result was’, says Luke in his Memories, ‘that we did not see Howell any more.’ Partly because of these manoeuvres, partly because of the loss of patrons, the Joneses found it hard to manage in 1870–1, although the firm for the first time paid a dividend of £25. But there was in any case much less entertaining at The Grange.

  Meanwhile, although he refused to weaken or to change his methods, Burne-Jones was attacked by the occupational disease of the lonely artist, a fear that he was losing grip. On 14 August 1871 he noted that the first three windows for Meole Brace ‘cost £40 but were not worth 40d. I have never produced work of such marked inferiority … let us say no more about it.’ But only a few weeks later he was able to make a half-ironical entry. ‘St Hugh, St Peter, St George, £36, slight and hurried in handling I admit – but there is my old vigour of design and massive treatment of drapery – now I am off to Italy with the money I have so honourably earned.’

  The decision seemed to Georgie very sudden. ‘He hardly mentioned it, so as to go without fuss,’ she wrote to Rosalind Howard on 27 September. Many English painters, professional and amateur, took the trip as a matter of course and would be there already. Spencer Stanhope was at Bellosguardo, Burton in Rome, Ned’s old enemies of the O.W.S. had set up their autumn camp-stools at Vallombrosa. There was an element of recreation in all this, but Burne-Jones did not want recreation, still less did he care about picturesque detail. He was not even travelling, as Morris admitted that he was, to escape his ‘horrors’. Knowing himself, as he always did, to be a small master, a ‘fourth-rate Florentine painter’ as he put it, ‘in a large commercial city’, he wanted confirmation from what was strong, grave, and secret in quattrocento painting. On 16 September he wrote to Murray that he had not slept for four or five nights, and had been told by the doctor that he positively needed a change. Georgie took the children to the Baldwins, Rooke remained in charge of the studio, and Ned set out, after nine years’ absence, for Italy.

  Travel in Italy was a good deal easier than it had been in 1862. The railway system had been extended, and there was a more or less uniform currency. But a papal nuncio’s visa was needed for Rome as well as a papal police visa to leave it, and not only Baedeker, but all guide books, regarded the Italians as a necessary evil, ‘conspiring to embitter the traveller’s enjoyment of their delightful country’. Italian hoteliers withheld the bill till the last moment, when ‘hurry and confusion render overcharges less liable to discovery’. Water had to be boiled or mixed with wine, flannel must be worn after sunset to avoid ‘Ravenna fever’ and malaria (from which Ned had suffered in Venice), books were still examined at customs and tiresome religious festivals interfered with the serious business of sightseeing. It is amazing that Burne-Jones, apparently so helpless a traveller, sick in trains, muddled about money, could have managed at all, particularly in view of the rigorous timetable he set himself. Eight weeks was usually recommended for the tour he wanted to make in three. But the spirit was stronger then the flesh.

  Burne-Jones recorded his journey in a shilling notebook,7 on the inner cover of which he wrote:

  Note. Please not to read the writing in this book – the notes are made for myself only – to help a weak memory – they will not amuse, and would have been written in Chinese, if I had known that tongue.

  This alone shows how painful had been the exposure of his inner feelings to public criticism.

  He went straight through France by rail and reached Turin on 21 September; the first sketch in the notebook is of the Botticelli Tobit and the Triumph of Chastity. ‘These 2 and the Mantegna I cared for alone.’ The same evening he was drawing the harbour steps in Genoa and the peculiar way the sails were furled, and making notes – as he did throughout the trip of dark sootoporticos, narrow lighted openings and ‘mounting streets’.

  Next he took the coast road by diligenza (‘the company is usually far from select and the carriage uncomfortable’) though Sestri Levante and La Spezia to Pisa; he scribbled down notes on mountains and olive groves. The journey apparently took from 5.00 a.m. to 5.00 in the afternoon, but Burne-Jones recorded it as a ‘great day’. The 24th was Sunday; he ‘did’ the Campo Santo in the morning, rushing on to Florence at noon. Professor Norton, whom he had hoped to meet, was not there, but he was just in time to see the Duomo by daylight, and was so excited that he ‘walked about till night’. He allowed two days for the Uffizi, Santa Croce and Fiesole, a morning at San Gimignano where he drew several pages of towers and secret blank stone houses, then, without stopping at Siena, to Orvieto by midnight on the 27th. This was too late for the cathedral, but after a night at an inn he went in the morning and evening to see Signorelli’s The Damned Cast into Hell. On Friday the 29th he was at Viterbo, but the rush and excitement had affected him oddly and between Fiacone and Viterbo he had a dream, which he was able to put down in the notebook, of the Nine Muses facing the rising sun. He just stopped long enough in Viterbo to see the Signorelli, and ‘to Rome by 9 in one evening’.

  In Rome, which Burne-Jones was visiting for the first time, a permesso, with a recommendation from the appropriate consul, was necessary to copy pictures at the Vatican. Ned ignored this. Although Rome did not live up to his dreams he wrote to Rooke that he no longer felt depressed and in fact was in better health than for three or four years. St Peter’s was ‘pompous and empty’ and he apparently missed the Pietà, but the Pantheon was ‘glorious’, and in the crowded streets ‘no men and women on earth look out of their eyes as they [the Romans] do’.

  Monday was troublesome because places were closed and ‘a silly fiesta was going on … much trouble to see the Sistine’. At 2.00 p.m. the tiresome festivities were over and he rushed in, folded up his travelling rug, lay down on it and read the frescoes through an opera glass. He noted that gold had been used ‘a very little to heighten the lights on the lower pictures to counterbalance the ceiling’. Ruskin had been wrong about the deterioration of the Michaelangelos. ‘The Sleeping Adam, the Last Judgment, the Botticellis and the 2 Signorellis [Publication of the Law and Death of Moses] as beautiful as anything in the world’ produced a kind of intoxication in which he forgot the embarrassment of lying down on the floor in the middle of a crowd of strangers. In the Vatican he memorised the early Raphaels and the da Vinci monochrome of St Jerome. It is hard to explain why, on the next page, he drew a ‘naked man weighing a fat cat on a pair of scales’, said to have been seen in a side chapel.

  The next stop was a turn northwards to Assisi, which he also saw for the first time. Here he studied intensely, recording the town by heart and setting himself down with his notebook at the street ends, ‘all dark except a thin space of sky’, or ‘windows letting a white light into dark archway’. The Giottos he found ‘much hurt by smoke’, the Three Angels and Abraham gave him ‘quite a new idea of Cimabue’. On 3 October the streets were filled with white bulls driven in from the country – it was the vigil of St Francis, though Ned does not mention this – and the picture-crazed visitor took time off to draw them and a litter of his favourite pigs. The next day he was off again by the despised diligenze to Perugia, where his hotel window looked out on a street with pots of herbs on every balcony. Here he made notes on a Signorelli musical angel at S. Onofrio –

  ‘the left leg hidden by altar rubbish’. T
hen there were ‘the noble Peruginos – Solomon and The Sybils but the strangest & most imaginative of all pictures here is one small predella subject by Piero della Francesca of the vision of St. Francis – the monk usually made asleep is here awake & his face is drawn with wonderful tenderness. The colour is dark & seems to resemble night & the gloom of trees & rocks beautifully painted.’

  Now he could not wait for Arezzo.

  He left Assisi at 11.00 a.m. and the diligenza brought him to Perugia by 3.00 in the afternoon on 5 October. People were ‘thin and poor, very like Perugino saints, thin-nosed and lipped’. After hastily copying a Signorelli predella he rushed out along the carriage-road to the Etruscan sepulchres, where he went down ‘40 or 50 steps’ and made his first studies of a subject which interested him exceedingly – the Medusa’s head. There were seveal of these heads on the sarcophagi, protecting the dead against violation of privacy and hated intrusion, and on the coffered ceiling there was the famous Gorgon.

  He was much excited on the train to Cortona, and drew the walls following the contours of the enfolding hills, then found the place squalid – ‘every other city built on a hill looks more like the name Cortona’, but not so the Signorellis ‘for which, after all, one came’. Trasimene, to his relief, was not blue, like Lake Como, but ‘the right colour of water’. Then at Arezzo he managed a double-page sketch of Piero’s Victory of Constantine, showing much more of the river scenery left in the background than there is now; ‘flesh colours, white girdles, & olive green & faint blue sky making the tone of his picture’, he wrote; here as so often, Burne-Jones was a pioneer of appreciation.

  It was time to go back to Florence. Conservatori now became tiresome and there are notes ‘not allowed to draw it’ and ‘not allowed to enter the grotto’. A heroic sightseeing Birmingham spirit took hold of him and he rushed round Michelangelo’s house (which had been open to the public only since 1858) peering at the great man’s slippers and walking-sticks. Since he could not get a print of the Captives, most emphatically an example of ‘dark carnality’, he made careful drawings himself. The next stage, after a few quiet hours at Sta Maria Novella and in the green cloister, was Genoa, and here, among pages of orange and olive trees, hill towns and studies of drapery Ned suddenly drew a baby sitting in the middle of a piazza, ‘the central and solitary figure’. He was homesick for Margaret.