Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  As he left Italy he summed up: ‘I now care most for Michaelangelo, Luca Signorelli, Mantegna, Giotto, Botticelli, Andrea del Sarto, Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca.’ This was his mature judgement and he did not change it, but he had seen almost as much outside as inside the galleries and churches.

  The last dash was along the coast road through Mentone to Paris. Here the frivolous population were absorbed in the sale of Empress Eugénie’s underwear, while the authorities were mounting trials of communards and pétroleuses. Although Ned had been tormented with nightmares over the siege of Paris, he now ignored everything but the Louvre, and, in the Louvre, the Mantegna allegories. Difficulties were great. Because of the still unsettled conditions, copying was forbidden, and there were now French attendants to deal with. ‘I had to steal this note hastily.’ The ‘notes’ included the Triumph of Virtue, Vulcan and his streaming cloak from the Parnassus, the Venus and the circle of dancing girls, whose hair, as Rossetti said, seems to be felt brushing across the face as each one passes. With admirable persistence Ned ‘stole the lovely hair-ribbons of the dancing muse’. He also ‘snatched’ the olive-crowned faun supporting a dying woman in de Costa’s Myth of Comus, and a ‘leg of Mantegna’s Mercury, blue-tipped with gold both shoe and feather’. Though Burne-Jones’s taste was entirely his own, he was, as a travelling artist, worthy after all of Baedeker, who treated every visit to a foreign country as a campaign where victory must never be conceded to the natives.

  The book ends with a row of little houses, each with its chimney, backing on the railway – ‘London’ – and above his list of shops and photographers a pair of eyes squinting terribly – the sign of a lunatic sightseer. Yet Burne-Jones felt ‘full of the inspiration I went to look for’. It was the most important journey he ever made. He arrived at The Grange with photographs from Cuccioni, an ‘odious smile’, as he admitted, of superiority at the sight of London fog, and some Italian tastes, for he immediately ordered oil flasks from the firm.

  But Morris had been home from Iceland since the beginning of September, and Ned found himself once again in the middle of ‘unspoken miseries’. On 20 October (he got back on the 16th) he was at a dinner party at Queen Square to hear Morris read aloud his new poem, the ‘marriage interlude’ Love is Enough. Neither Rossetti nor Janey were there. According to Bell Scott, Rossetti’s engagement ‘was, actually, Janey at his own house for the night. Is it not too daring, and altogether inexplicable?’8

  Although Scott fell asleep during the reading, he was a shrewd observer enough. His letters, as Professor Fredeman has pointed out, show only too clearly how odd the situation appeared to an outsider. But Ned wrote confidently to Norton that Morris’s poem was ‘wondrously happy’, while ‘as for Gabriel I have seen him but little, for he … gets ill and is better and is restless, and wants and wants, and I can’t amuse him’.

  Ned also told Norton that he had sixty pictures, oil and water-colour, on hand, and that in the new confidence that Italy inspired, he no longer cared what the public would think of them. The two studios, in fact, were full of unfinished work, in charge of the faithful Rooke. ‘His studio was a mass of slightly poised objects’, Rooke recalled, ‘with but a narrow path between them that he never knocked against them [sic]. It was a means of triumph for his subtle nature.’9 One of these objects was the solid wooden model of Troy Town which is still in existence. It had been constructed to help with another huge undertaking which stood gathering dust in the studio and which eventually, Rooke said, became ‘just the size of the room in which it was done, and had to be built up like a ship in a bottle’. This was the dreaded Troy Triptych, really a work of piety, since it was based on the Scenes from the Fall of Troy which Morris planned to write in 1857, but which had been put aside when the Red House was sold. From the never-to-be-finished main canvas Burne-Jones took several designs, including the Wheel of Fortune. For the naked male figures he used, in defiance of Ruskin, the studies he had made of the Michelangelo Captives. But Fortune, with eyes shut like the Blind Love of Chant d’Amour, seems almost too indifferent to turn the huge queerly-drawn wheel which cuts the canvas vertically in two. She is twice the height of her victims (an effect which he may have studied from Watts), and this is only one source of the discomfort caused by this strange picture.

  The water-colour version of the Wheel (1872–86) took years to complete, and this became characteristic of Burne-Jones as he reached his mature style. He grew used to working alone or with assistants who transferred his designs from brown paper cartoons to the canvas and filled in with monochrome ready for the next stage. He drew numbers of preliminary studies, left weeks for the drying between each stage, started again rather than correct. Often the canvases were put aside and he allowed the subject to grow in his mind, perhaps for years, consulting no one. The scrupulousness of the painter was only matched by the patience of his paying customers.

  The colours grew stranger. To Graham Robertson the system seemed like a child ‘filling in’ from a paint-box, yet he could not deny its power. ‘Shot’ colours appear, like those of Mantegna’s Allegory, blue shaded with brown and green with orange. Burne-Jones, Watts explained to Frances Balfour, gave each tone a gemlike texture, ‘so that if you examine into it, you find it composed of a vast number of pieces of colour skilfully blended, and each lovely in itself.’ The canvases themselves grew much larger, often very tall or ‘the lengthwise sort’, although Ned knew perfectly well that these were difficult to sell, having done his best to persuade Graham to accept Rossetti’s vast Dante’s Dream.10 The much greater size of the picture asks the spectator to leave his own world and enter the painter’s. It is a dream world, without perspective in depth, but with flat planes of colour; it is a realm of knowledge as well as feeling, or rather the deeply-read Burne-Jones does not distinguish between the two. Even more since his study of the Hypnerotomachia, he had felt the insidious charm of the neo-platonic reading of the myth. ‘And say this is really the hidden and religious meaning of the flaying of Marsyas in old stories’, he wrote, ‘who was a thick-skinned person whom nothing could teach until the merciful healing Apollo removed his outer hide and then he saw things keenly and clearly.’11 Of the gravely posed figures in his distinctive world one might say, as Ned’s diary said about the Romans, that ‘no man or woman on earth look out of their eyes as they do’. This is the characteristic Burne-Jones glance, looking either away or inwards; but which? And are they contented or uneasy, and, for the matter of that, are they women or men? Some light is thrown on this by Burne-Jones’s remark that he had no use for genius which did not include its own femininity within it.

  One subject he took directly from the Hypnerotomachia – Love Among the Ruins (1870–3), where the lover and his Polia sit among fallen pillars and stones with mysterious inscriptions, hemmed in by the briar rose which rambles over all, and searching for the way to Cythara where in the end they will find nothing but separation. Like Fair Rosamund and Laus Veneris, it is the answer to the title of an earlier poem, in this case of Browning who ends his Love Among the Ruins with a reassuring ‘Love is best’. The picture is difficult to judge because it only exists in a large, hard-faced, later version. ‘It’s better painted,’ a friend said to him about this replica, ‘but the spirit of youth which was in the other, is not there,’ and Burne-Jones agreed. This friend, Stopford Brooke, also noticed how ‘onlooking and pursuing’ the artist was in the early seventies, and yet ‘somewhat more weighted by life’ than he was ten years later.

  The second version of the Hesperides was finished between 1870 and 1873, in some of the richest reds possible in water-colour. It has a strong centrifugal design, as though the dancers were unwillingly bound to their magic tree. Burne-Jones had a passion for dancing, not only for the dancers in Mantegna and Botticelli but for the art of the music-hall. For him, then and for many years to come, the ‘Miriam Ariadne Salome’ of the halls was Katie Vaughan (real name Catherine Candelon), a true cockney, child of a theatre musi
cian, ‘brought out’ with her sister in 1872. Katie later became celebrated in burlesque at the Gaiety, but when Ned went with Luke Ionides to the Adelphi and Drury Lane the high point of her act was the graceful daring gyration of her ‘skirt dance’. (Katie, however, to quote her obituary in The Stage, ‘had always been accustomed to the manners of good society, which in itself is a liberal education.’)

  Some of the many studies which Ned made of dancers were for a picture which took him twelve years to finish, a work as magical as Green Summer and the one by which he might like most of all to be judged. Constantine Ionides commissioned The Mill (1870–82) and it is still hung (in a very poor light) among his bequests to the Victoria and Albert. In the foreground are the Three Graces who, as we know from Ion, are Marie Spartali (in profile on the right), Mary Zambaco and Aglaia Coronio. The clasped hands are those of the giving and receiving Graces, and they dance, not in a vortex like the Hesperides, but in a secret trance, to the music of love on the right. The expression of the women’s faces is intense, and the picture, as The Times pointed out when it was shown in 1882, ‘reflects its truth only from certain mental states’, lit by the deep and powerful sunset glow that comes just before dark. Behind them is the gleaming mill pool, perhaps – as Ion suggests – a recollection of the mill race under Gothic arches at Alberga, perhaps of the three mills near Oxford within a mile of each other – Milton, Steventon and Sutton Courtney. The naked men bathing in a pool (worrying to Henry James, omitted by the Royal School of Art Needlework in their tapestry version) are in the second plane. Trees shadow the water. At the back are the undershot wheels and the miller’s men moving in flat punts with sacks of grain and going up the just-seen steps into the dark interior. Distant though it is, the mill gives its title to the picture, and the ‘burden’ arises from the harmony between work, recreation and music – a harmony produced by the mysterious twilight influence of the mill.

  For the first time in this picture Burne-Jones made a deliberate reference, to be understood by ‘the few people I care for’, to his Italian masters, to the Primavera and to the bathing figures in the Piero Baptism. But the mill itself directs us to Ruskin’s dreams of the Society of St George, a settlement where wind and water would be the only motive power, steam being ‘a furious waste of fuel to do what every steam and breeze are ready to do costlessly … gun-powder and steam hammers are today the toys of the insane and the paralytic’. The mill is a place of peace where even the pool is at rest, flowing out downstream imperceptibly while the dance goes on.

  While Burne-Jones sank himself in the long process of finishing these canvases, Whistler was propping up dozens of Nocturnes to dry, for any passer-by to see, outside his house at Cheyne Walk, and Pissarro with a group of friends had fled the disturbances of Paris to settle in Norwood, where they were producing delicious impressions of the dreary suburb in rain and snow. All these artists defied the salons, all ignored the others almost completely, with the necessary blindness of painters truly at work.

  Burne-Jones of course, had returned from Italy short of money. ‘My affairs’, he told Fairfax Murray (26 December 1871), ‘are in their accustomed muddle,’12 and he had to ask for some drawings of Fortune which he had ‘lent or given’ to the acquisitive Murray, so that he could sell them. To Ellis, who had commissioned three figures of Faith, Hope and Temperance, he wrote that he would have to charge for the frames, ‘they are not costly. “Evidently not to you,” you reply,’ he adds disarmingly.

  At his back there was always Georgie, ‘Georgie is tremendous and stirs up the house into a froth every morning with energy,’ Ned wrote to George Howard.13 She saw to it that he could go straight to the painting room after breakfast, taking his second cup of coffee with him, and struggled to regulate matters for a man whose clothes were shapeless and whose habits, except in regard to his precious tools of work, were hopelessly untidy. It must have been a great relief to her that Howell, in mysterious circumstances, had moved to a house much farther away in Fulham.14 Georgie, however, could not manage the growing problem of Phil by herself. His grandmother, old Mrs Macdonald, had divined the ‘growing power of worry’ in the nine-year-old boy. Ned was still drawing from Mary Zambaco, and it was hardly possible that the child could go on much longer without noticing anything. ‘How we came to decide finally upon sending him from home to school does not matter’, is the way the Memorials put it, and Phil’s fate was sealed. Worse still, they decided to send this firstborn son, whom they tenderly loved, to Marlborough, simply because Morris had been there, although he had disliked the place and had learned next to nothing there, ‘for indeed’, as he recalled, ‘next to nothing was taught.’ Appealed to, Morris dashed off a letter to Charlie Faulkner at Oxford: ‘If you are not dead and buried, I wish to ask you a question … Ned is thinking about Marlborough as a school for Phil and wants to know what reputation the school has at present; of course one means principally what sort of chaps they send up to University.’15 Why did one mean this principally? Certainly the headmaster was now Dr (later Dean) Farrar, who had modified the earlier toughness, but nothing would make Phil, now or ever, a suitable subject for public school. But the parents seemed unable to stop themselves. ‘Don’t send little Stan to school, Louie,’ Ned wrote to Mrs Baldwin, ‘it’s much worse than you would think, and I don’t feel sure at all of the compensating good.’ Stanley Baldwin was sent to Harrow.

  And yet in their treatment of Phil’s cousin Rudyard, Uncle Ned and Aunt Georgie could never make a mistake. In Something of Myself Kipling left a most touching memorial to both of them, a child’s eye view of The Grange as a Christmas refuge from the ‘House of Desolation’ – the unpleasant lodgings in Southsea to which his parents had unwisely entrusted him when they went back to India. The Grange was a place of wonderful smells of paint and turpentine, where the Beloved Aunt played the organ and the Uncle continued drawing among the children’s riots, or hid under a rug to become the ‘fitful head’, an oracle which answered all questions in a voice ‘deeper than all the boots in the world’. Cartoons in charcoal stood about with only their eyes painted in white, a magical effect to Ruddie; his uncle took him to the South Kensington Museum, and gave him Sidonia and the Arabian Nights. Morris read poetry aloud, sitting astride the creaking rocking-horse in the nursery, while his cousins played with him – indeed only Browning, among all the visitors, declined to do this. After the death of his uncle, Kipling ‘begged for and was given’ the iron bell-pull of The Grange for his own house in the hope that other children might also feel happy when they rang it.

  The six-year-old Ruddie certainly did not guess at the emotional pressures in The Grange. But in the crowded first-floor studio Burne-Jones was at work on another group of pictures, whose theme recurred throughout his life from some deep source of turbulence. The first Sleeping Beauty or Briar Rose set, the Girls with Lanterns setting out in a boat for the other shore, the second Mirror of Venus and ‘a procession of girls coming downstairs’ are all reflections of the same subject, the confrontation of the young girl with time, experience, change and sex. The young girl, in the early 1870s, was Frances Graham.

  Why does the rose have to open, what is the turn of the screw, why does Alice have to realise that they’re nothing but a pack of cards? These questions, which the Victorians posed again and again, come from the wry middle-aged onlooker or admirer or both. Burne-Jones, unlike Charles Dodgson or Henry James, was an artist with the normal experience of a man of forty, and from this normality he saw the terrible falling short between expectation and reality. ‘There are so many deaths’, he told Frances, ‘besides the pale face which looks in at the door one day.’ But, of course, warning, experience and love are all ignored by the young life starting out. It was at this time that he began to sign his letters with a drawing of a decrepit old man: ‘your Ancient Ned’, the familiar figure with crumpled trousers, paintbrush in hand.

  Frances was the younger daughter of Ned’s patron, William Graham, the India merchant and Liber
al M.P. for Glasgow. She was the fourth of eight children, brought up in a wealthy home where ‘money was not much considered’, but with a strong Presbyterian background. She could remember plain high teas at which her father read aloud from the Bible. But Graham’s religious convictions, as strong as old Mrs Ruskin’s though much more kindly, combined strangely with a passion for beautiful objects and pictures. He collected beyond reason: canvases lay in heaps on the floor. He was an early connoisseur of ikons and Italian primitives, and his flair was so well-known that Gladstone made him a trustee of the National Gallery. With contemporary painters, his ‘own’ kind of painter, he had a close, almost physical sympathy and was ready with delicate advice and help.

  Graham was at first alone in his enthusiasm – nudes had to be smuggled into the house to avoid distressing his wife – but as soon as his daughters were old enough he began to take them on Sunday afternoon visits to the studios.

  Frances felt that she did not take after her father, being one of the ‘mid-ones’ of the family, but she had his very wide-apart changeling’s eyes – ‘ghost eyes’, Margot Asquith called them – with a disturbing fairness of her own. At first the girls felt it very dull when Graham stopped taking them to Cheyne Walk where the ‘romantically widowed’ Rossetti read aloud to them from The House of Life, and began calling instead at The Grange. But Frances soon divined that there was another loneliness there, gentler and harder to reach. Out of it began a friendship which, as she said, ‘coloured my whole life’, and Graham, who also sensed it, began to ask Burne-Jones to dinner regularly twice a week. In her reminiscences, Time Remembered, she describes Burne-Jones as ‘about forty, and living a quiet life’. And (although in Swinburne’s line ‘time remembered is grief forgotten’) she adds: ‘he was not very happy.’