Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  2 longer ones £800 each

  3 middle size £600 each

  1 smaller £400

  The whole scene is to have four ‘golden pictures’ to link it up, and ‘pattern work’ (the design for this is the Tate Gallery), but this may prove too elaborate. Meanwhile he asks for £500 on account ‘as I might be in need of it’, so that he can go on with the job while Balfour came to The Grange to approve the sketches. But here the airy perfectionist had met his match. He waited a lifetime for his music room, but Burne-Jones, always on the verge of getting the design quite right, never finished it.

  Watts also felt that Ned might benefit from a change of background. In August 1875, after the demolition of Little Holland House, Watts built the Iron House (also known as the Tin Pot) in the grounds of his new site in Melbury Road, and he invited Burne-Jones to share this new studio. Two large canvases with designs blocked in were delivered but never completed, and in fact they stayed there until the Tin Pot was taken down and only the two doors remained. A feeling was growing meanwhile among these people who were so used to getting things done – the Howards, the Prinseps, the Balfours – that Ned should show his pictures in public again – but where? Perhaps, as George Eliot suggested (3 March 1876), in a ‘separate little gallery’. This, of course, was not a problem for him alone. ‘Mr Burne-Jones is more than right not to exhibit,’ Watts wrote in 1875, disgusted with the poor arrangements at the Manchester Modern Art Exhibition. Graham was the person who could formerly have been relied upon to arrange such matters, but he was terribly broken down by the loss of his young son, poisoned in his school holidays by an overdose of medicine and dead in a few minutes in Frances’s arms. From this death Graham never quite recovered, but both he and Leyland were prepared to lend from their collections if a site could be found.

  These plans to bring Ned out of seclusion into a confrontation with a new public were unexpectedly interrupted by a crisis which made them, for the time being, seem quite unimportant. For the first and last time in his life, Burne-Jones became interested in politics, and in the perpetual delusion that through political means we can better the human condition.

  12

  1876–8

  A RETURN TO THE WORLD: THE GROSVENOR GALLERY

  When Norton visited the young Joneses in 1868 he found Ned ‘a strong, almost bitter, republican, and the condition of England is to him a scandal and a reproach. He is a genuine democrat, of a democracy that will endure.’ Throughout the past seven years Ned had never changed his opinions on the industrial society. They had been formed when he wrote The Cousins and when he patrolled the seething London streets, and renewed at the Working Men’s College and again when he visited Birmingham in 1872 and found it ‘a hole’ where he could scarcely bear to stay, as he told George Howard, ‘to save my Brummagem life’. But he had limited his response to the original undertaking made at Le Havre – to help to make nineteenth-century England less blind to beauty. In Morris’s wider application: ‘I know by my own feelings and desires what these men want. What would have saved them from the lowest depths of savagery … reasonable labour, reasonable rest. There is only one thing that can give them this – art.’ In Norman Grosvenor, who with Walford Davies founded the People’s Concert Society, he found a friend after his own way of thinking. But in 1876 we find him writing to Norman Grosvenor.

  I never cared about any matter so much in all my life and felt so certain of anything, as to how I should decide rightly – or half so resolute to do everything that lay in one’s poor way lay ready to hand to help – in my heart I know politics to be the one great subject of life, for which one should put aside all private matters and for which one should give up everything – but as books say on their title pages I reserve the right of translation. What [sic] I mean by politics – I do from my soul want my country to help mankind – to set aside its low interests that are base in the individual and shameful in the community – I want it dreadfully, so that if at this time we by indifference, folly, or selfishness lose our chance, I shall never in my life days [sic] recover from the disappointment of it … I confess it is not a bit my faculty to know what is expedient or advisable in practical business but I am sick of diplomacy and the least taint of it … and I can’t see what harm can come of saying out what one means and thinks.1

  The ‘matter’ which stirred Ned to feel that politics were the great subject of life was the Eastern Question of 1876. This crisis, which agitated liberal and radical England to what might seem a surprising extent, originated from the massacre of Bulgarian Christians by the Turks, most ably reported by the great newspaper correspondents, then in their heyday, and in particular by W.T. Stead. Ned could not fail to be reminded of Mary Zambaco’s great-grandfather, crucified on his house door by the Turks. The Bulgarian massacres themselves, dismissed at first as ‘coffee-house babble’ by Disraeli, led to a threat of war by Russia. Disraeli was determined to support the Turks, not only to check any possible designs on the Tsar on the route to India but because, as a Jew, the Russian pogroms moved him far more deeply than anything the Turks had done. Gladstone, who had retired from the Liberal leadership the year before, emerged to produce his famous pamphlet on 3 September 1876. Forty thousand copies were sold in the first four days.

  The real uneasiness went much deeper than the Bulgarian crisis, and involved the whole direction of British foreign policy. Disraeli had become Lord Beaconsfield on 12 August; on 9 November he spoke ‘amid the wine-cups’ (as Freeman put it) of the Lord Mayor’s banquet, of our inexhaustible resources if we chose to draw the sword; in the same year, under the Royal Titles Act, the Queen was proclaimed Empress of India. The whole concept of Britain as a warmaking imperialist power, the whole suggestion that politics and morality had no necessary connection seemed in 1876 to hinge on this one question, and to Liberals the enemy was Jingoism, Disraeli and ‘Empress Brown’. It goes without saying that the Liberal ranks were deeply divided, but they had the powerful support of Punch and the Telegraph; and the Nonconformist clergy, with a strong chapel-led working-class movement, gave them real moral authority. They stood, however, against a confused but strong popular feeling. Charles Dilke, going home from the Dudley Gallery, saw a small crowd going off in an excess of patriotism to smash Gladstone’s windows.

  Morris flung himself with all his usual energy into the Liberal agitation and was elected treasurer of the Eastern Question Association. Ned, describing himself to George Howard as ‘a boiling cauldron of fury’ – as indeed he could be at times – was deeply committed, and found himself, for the first time since the Hogarth Club, struggling with all the disheartening processes of democracy, committees, endless letters, and even public speaking. Although he seems to have been too ill to attend the meeting of December 1876, after which the Queen asked Disraeli whether the Attorney-General could not ‘be set at these men’, he was certainly there in January 1878, with Faulkner and Crom Price, when the workmen’s neutrality demonstration was convened at Exeter Hall and a crowd of thousands sang Morris’s ‘Wake, London Lads’. By this time Allingham, Watts, de Morgan and even du Maurier had been drawn in. But for this meeting Gladstone did not, as he had in 1876, make a special journey from Hawarden.

  After Russia declared war on Turkey in April 1877 and showed signs of winning, Jingoist feeling ran high and support for the agitation began to ebb away. Disraeli felt himself strong enough to defy his enemies, and Gladstone, who had given very little real lead of any kind, appeared to have second thoughts and became engrossed in the coming elections and his own return to power. The Liberal party ceased to oppose. Morris could ‘scarcely look people in the face’, particularly the working-men’s delegations, ‘though I did my best to keep the thing up’. Britain emerged from the negotiations with Cyprus, and the next spring Gladstone contested Midlothian.

  Morris’s retreat from politics was to be temporary only, and Georgie too had discovered that she had a gift for committee-work and organisation. Burne-Jones’s disillusionment wa
s total. He never changed his opinions, but he never again expected anything from either politics or politicians. He determined – with every acknowledgement that this might be a sign of weakness – to go back to his studio and confine himself to his life’s proper business, painting.

  Meanwhile the new gallery, about which so much had been said, looked like becoming a reality. The promoter was to be Sir Coutts Lindsay, the fifty-three-year-old elegant banker and amateur painter, who contested with Cyril Flower the title of the handsomest man in London and who, it may be remembered, had met and wooed Blanche Fitzroy at Little Holland House. It was not the habit of the House of Rothschild to make marriage settlements for their daughters which gave control of property to the husbands, but Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay were, between them, exceedingly well off. In 1876–7, amid great interest and many informed rumours, they set about building the Grosvenor Gallery.

  Their architect, W.T. Sams, had produced an advanced design for a structure of iron girders, made fire-proof with concrete, with heating and cooling plants worked by steam mechanisms, a hydraulic lift, and a device for modifying the light. Sir Coutts, however, wanted they whole thing to look like an Italian palazzo, and the first thing that anyone noticed in New Bond Street was the imposing stone façade with a Palladian door which had been imported from Santa Lucia in Venice. Inside, as the opening date approached, the décor showed how it had been for either Morris or Whistler to make headway against the natural Victorian taste for accumulating things – things, the original Spoils of Poynton, which stood and lay about in the homes of everyone who could afford them. The Grosvenor Gallery, intended as a refined background for fine paintings, was full of plants, velvet sofas, gilded and marble tables covered with Japanese, blue and white and Minton china, globes of rainbow glass and hanging lamps. The statuettes included one of a sailor lad, entitled ‘Cheeky’: the ceiling was painted blue with gold stars, the walls were divided with pillars from the old Italian opera house in Paris, and on the ground floor was a ‘splendid salle à manger’.

  The most debatable point was the colour of the walls, which were hung with crimson silk damask. Only Watts, who knew that his low-keyed portraits would look better on a strong background, really approved of the damask, and indeed Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay appear to have consulted no one about the décor but themselves.

  They had, however, engaged two young men as assistants. One was Charles Hallé, son of the pianist, with all the charm and inability to settle to anything that is characteristic of the sons of famous fathers. The other was Joe Comyns Carr, a bit of a lawyer, a bit of an actor, a bit of a writer, a blagueur and good companion. Mrs Comyns Carr, charming and excitable, was a new bohemian such as only an English parsonage could produce: her muslin draperies, falling in wrinkled folds, were ‘set’ by being cooked in a potato steamer. The Carrs, and Joe in particular, became immediate friends of Burne-Jones, but though he may have been slow to realise it, he was facing here a new threat, more insidious than the entrenched hostile official ranks. The Carrs were the forerunner of a new danger, this time from fashion itself. They were among the first of the Aesthetes, and the Aesthetic movement, like all movements led not by artists but their followers, would first dilute, then copy, then exaggerate, then become ridiculous, then grow out of date. It was, after all, a consumer movement, with time and money to spare, centred first on the form, then on Liberty’s. When Mrs Comyns Carr writes in her memoirs that ‘our predicament when we arrived in Paris without enough money to register our luggage roused screams of laughter’, it is not the same thing as Ned alone and hungry in London, or Madox Brown pawning his wife’s shawl. With the Aesthetes the protest against the Philistines continued, but in becoming fashionable it became less serious.

  Whatever doubts they may have had about the décor, the artists who were invited – and exhibition was by invitation only – were grateful for the princely courtesy of the new gallery. Space was tactfully allocated, and with only two pictures to each bay there was no feeling of overcrowding. The only artist to refuse was Rossetti and he did so only after explaining his reasons in a letter to The Times (27 March 1877) in which he added, with his old generosity, that the project must succeed ‘were it only for one name associated with it – that of Burne-Jones – a name representing the loveliest art we have’. Ned scarcely ever read the papers, but someone showed him this passage and he wrote to thank Gabriel: ‘If there’s anything in me for you or others like it’s your making.’ But it would have meant even more to him if he could have persuaded Rossetti to exhibit. ‘I shall feel very naked against the shafts’, he wrote again, ‘and as often as I think of it I repent promising – but it doesn’t really matter – the worst will be temporary disgrace and one needn’t read criticisms. I promised them to write to you about it – and it’s true I wish you would send, but that’s all.’2

  Sir Coutts, in sending out his invitations, was anxious not to offend the Academy beyond repair. Not only Watts, but Leighton, Grant, Millais and Alma Tadema, all Academicians, promised to send. Nevertheless, the Grosvenor was felt to be a contre-salon on a grand scale. Burne-Jones himself was almost an unknown quantity, although Watts forecast to Charles Rickards that ‘Burne-Jones will be very strong … in fact I expect him to extinguish almost all the painters of the day, so you may prepare to be knocked off your legs’. The Mirror of Venus was now finished, so were six splendid panels of the Days of Creation, adapted from a window design for Tamworth church in Staffordshire; he also sent a St George, a Sibyl (this also was Mary Zambaco and a copy was made for the ‘Duchess’), Ellis’s Spes, Fides and Temperantia and the great Beguiling of Merlin. Nimuë now towered over Merlin in steel blue curves, more like a serpent than a human being, crowned with red hair against the intricate pattern of may blossom. But whether Ned knew it or not the original, Mary herself, was in desperate straits in Paris; ‘she was very pale,’ Mrs Stillman had written to Rossetti, ‘very ill-dressed, and she must be very ill, for her hair was quite black.’3

  The private view of the first Grosvenor Gallery exhibition was fixed for 30 April, and not to receive a ticket was a social death. There were in fact three openings: one for intimate friends on the Sunday afternoon; an immensely grand dinner-party, attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales in the restaurant – the protocol here was arranged, after much anxiety, by Charles Hallé and Arthur Sullivan, who was an intimate of the Lindsays and composed music for tableaux vivants at their Scottish house parties; then, on 1 May, came the public opening, when seven thousand people passed the turnstile on the first morning.

  All went expecting something strange and, according to Henry James, were amazed to find the pictures the right way up. One entered by the West Gallery, to be confronted by Watt’s superb Love and Death, then a group of Sir Coutts’s own indifferent pictures – there were a good many of these, and some of Lady Lindsay’s – then Holman Hunt’s Afterglow in Egypt, Spencer Stanhope, Frederick Burton and Burne-Jones. Albert Moore and Legros were hung between Burne-Jones and Whistler, who sent etchings and portraits (including the Carlyle) as well as Nocturnes. The only picture of his for sale was the Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Falling Rocket, which was priced at 200 guineas. In the East Gallery there were the Leightons and eight pictures by the hard-working Poynter, including Georgie’s portrait; after that the exhibition was felt to fall off with society scenes by Tissot and Heilbluth’s cardinals. The water-colour gallery was a disappointment, except for Dicky Doyle’s fairies.

  The main confrontation was undoubtedly between the eccentric Whistler and the eccentric Jones. As Graham Robertson put it, ‘one wall was iridescent with the plumage of Burne-Jones’s angels, one mysteriously blue with Whistler’s Nocturnes’. But whereas Whistler was a public figure, Burne-Jones, except to his intimates and loyal patrons, had become almost forgotten as a painter. He had not exaggerated when he told Rossetti that he felt naked at this new exposure. The Grosvenor opening was a day of trial, and he emerged from it a successful man. ‘From that
day’, Georgie wrote, ‘he belonged to the world in a sense that he never had done before, for his existence became widely known and his name famous.’

  Some violent hostility the Lindsays had expected and Mrs Comyns Carr for one would have been disappointed if there had been none. Punch was particularly hard on ‘the quaint, the queer, the mystic over-much and the Nimuë ‘at least twelve heads high’. Lady Butler, in a well-known passage from her memoirs, describes how:

  I felt myself getting more and more annoyed while perambulating these rooms, and to such a point of exasperation was I compelled that I fairly fled, and, breathing the honest air of Bond Street, took a hansom to my studio. There I pinned a seven foot sheet of brown paper on an old canvas and … flung the charge of ‘The Greys’ upon it.

  This introduces the question of unwholesomeness. Harry Quilter, that most commonplace of critics, observed, with more sharpness than usual, that Burne-Jones’s work ‘all has some trace in it of that purely physical side of love, which he depicts in such strange conjunction with its most immaterial aspect’. Why the conjunction should be strange, Quilter does not say.

  More sensitivity might be expected from two visitors who were not professional art critics, Oscar Wilde (still an undergraduate) and Henry James, established the year before in Bolton Street as an observer of the London scene. James, in his own words, was not amused by the Nocturnes, was doubtful about the ‘aesthetic refinement’ and ambisexuality of the Burne-Jones’s, but found the Merlin ‘brilliantly suggestive’; ‘Mr Burne-Jones’s lionship’, he added, ‘is owing partly to his “queerness” and partly to a certain air of mystery which had long surrounded him. He had not exhibited in public for many years, and people had the impression that his genius was growing “queerer” than ever.’ James felt that this impression was justified. The glaring red walls ‘cruelly discredited’ the pictures. Wilde agreed about the walls, and disliked the Nocturnes almost as much as James, but to him Burne-Jones was a great colourist ‘whose colour is no mere delight in the qualities of natural things … but expressive of the spirit’.