Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  But Burne-Jones was not ‘brought out’ easily. He feared he might be considered a bore. This danger past, he feared to enjoy himself too much. ‘Life and real people beguile me into being unreasonably happy’, he wrote to Mary Gladstone, ‘and it is hard to see back into the dream country where my real home is.’ Out of it, he was always more or less at risk. Frances Balfour was aghast when one of her dinner guests, the Commissioner of Lunacy for Scotland, hard as Aberdeen granite, began to attack Carlyle on the evidence of Froude’s Life. To Ned, Carlyle (in spite of the unfortunate visit) was an article of faith, and he became ‘white with distress and miserable anger, and said he must leave the house if such talk went on’. Only Arthur Balfour had the tact to smooth over the evening.

  At the same time – and here he was much more at his ease – the Grosvenor exhibition had led to a reopening of friendship with established painters whom Ned had scarcely seen for years. Val Prinsep, much too easy-going for the old ideals, had for years been ‘selling to H.R.M. and satisfying the Royal appetite for dairymaids’9 – worse still, he had painted the Queen as Empress of India – but he was an old friend; Millais Ned had always loved, and he went with both of them to the Fred Walker retrospective. Leighton, whom he had known, off and on, since the days of the Hogarth Club, was now a grand seigneur, tipped as the next president of the Royal Academy; Holland Park Road was regularly blocked with carriages arriving for ‘crushes’ at his magnificent new house. In 1877 he was extending the Arab Hall, for which Richard Burton was ‘nobbling’ old tiles in Smyrna, while William de Morgan, having rediscovered the secret of the old lustre, was filling up the gaps with splendid new ones. Leighton’s intention was to ‘let loose’ Walter Crane and Burne-Jones on the mosaic roof, and although in fact Ned never worked on it, he began to see Leighton much more often and from 1878 onwards he and Georgie attended the yearly ‘musics’ in the grand salon. These were reunions of the famous in society, art and letters, with exquisite performances, though Burne-Jones did not much care for Mendelssohn. ‘Talent and industry have no place in music,’ he said.

  More unexpected, perhaps, was Ned’s sympathy with Alma Tadema. ‘Tad’ was Dutch, uncompromisingly bourgeois, making frightful puns, comparing friendship to two hands clasped over the same stomach; talent and industry certainly had a place with him – his first commission from the dealer, Gambart, had been for ‘a couple of dozen at progressive prices’. He had been established for about seven years with his cosy family in Park Road, St John’s Wood, was smilingly surrounded in his studio by Graeco-Roman subjects, always with a bright blue sky, attended fancy-dress affairs in a toga and monocle, and had got up his dining-room as an imperial banqueting hall. Burne-Jones, however, loved him because he was lovable and valued him as a painter of reflections in bronze and marble. ‘Tad’ freely admitted that he had first become interested in these in the marble-lined smoking-room of the Cercle de la Concorde in Ghent. ‘No one ever has or ever will paint light on metal like Tadema,’ said Burne-Jones, who was beginning to make studies of bronze and gold for Cophetua. ‘Tad’ was also a portraitist from whom much could be learned, and the brilliant De Epps (his father-in-law) was shown at the Grosvenor in 1880; so that his favourite riddle: Q. When is a painter not a painter? A. None times out of ten – which Brune-Jones tactfully ‘gave up’ – was not quite so embarrassing as one might expect.

  ‘Tad’, who was endlessly hospitable and in touch with European painters, introduced Ned to Jules Bastien-Lepage, who in June 1882 was paying his last visit to England. Bastien-Lepage, already touched by the cancer which was to kill him a year later, was mainly interested in seeing the Rembrandt etchings in the British Museum, but he had time to do a few London sketches and one of them was of Burne-Jones; it is in the painter’s own spirit of faire vrai – a melancholy, light-eyed, haunted face under a shapeless and yet defiant soft hat.

  Much queerer was Ned’s encounter with Tissot who by 1877 had had considerable success with his delicious society pictures. But after a visit to the Grosvenor he experienced, it seems, a change of heart. ‘A big strong-looking man, and he made me compliments, and said he should paint no more as he had done of late.’10 Ned never spoke about this to anyone except Mrs Gaskell, being rather doubtful as to whether it was a conversion for the good since although he shrank from Tissot’s subject-matter (‘fat ladies and cigars’) he loved the quality of his paint.

  Friendship with Watts was steadfast and needed no renewal. The Signor was well established at what was now called Melbury Village. It was probably at his suggestion that the grey and blue Annunciation of 1879 was painted from Mrs Prinsep’s niece Julia; she had married the widowed Leslie Stephen. Against a street of tall arches and steps which Ned took from his 1871 notebook, Mrs Stephen appears in all the grave beauty of early pregnancy. The baby grew up to be Vanessa Bell.

  The multiplicity of Burne-Jones’s life, his total exhaustion after any expedition as well as his own frequent delcaration, which he didn’t perhaps intend to be taken too seriously, that he longed for the quiet and seclusion of a monastery, all led Georgie to look about (as she had looked for The Grange ten years earlier) for ‘a little house of our own by the sea.’ Ned suggested Brighton, which Georgie associated with the Ionides and hated. She ‘found nothing’, turned her back on Brighton, and walked westwards over the downs to Rottingdean. ‘It was a perfect autumn when … I entered the village from the north,’ she writes in the Memorials,

  no new houses then straggled out to meet one, but the little place lay peacefully within its gray garden walls, the sails of the windmill were turning slowly in the sun, and the miller’s black timber cottage was still there. The road I followed led me straight to the door of a house that stood empty on the village green, and we bought it at once.

  The name of the small whitewashed property was Prospect House. Milk came from the farm in pails (as indeed it had in Fulham when they first went there) and there were cornfields right up to the back window, with a view of the ridge of the downs ‘over the tender, bowed locks of the corn’. From the front windows you could see the solid little grey church, which had survived gales and fires and even the restorations of Gilbert Scott. Its dedication, by a happy chance, was St Margaret’s.

  It was the first house that had ever belonged to them. Morris himself had never had a place of his own since the Red House was given up, and Rossetti, who had never owned one at all, commented with amazement that ‘Ned was culminating’. This was an exaggeration. The house was only just large enough for the four of them, and was rigorously uncomfortable. Rottingdean in 1880 was a secluded, even secret village where boys in the street threw stones at strangers and black oxen were still used for ploughing. The mill had only just stopped grinding the villagers’ corn, there was only one horse-bus (known as ‘the coffin on wheels’) and the grocer, Tuppence, stocked everything from string to seed potatoes. But all this was a relief after the unwelcome changes which had been taking place in Fulham. The District Railway had arrived. All round The Grange speculative builders were running up streets of semi-detached villas. The walnut trees had gone, the briar roses had gone. Fulham had become West Kensington.

  The Grange, as a direct result of Ned’s new success, had become a scene of redecoration and the dreaded spring cleaning. His account books show extensive orders from the firm, including ‘Bird and Vine’ bed-hangings and (an unaccustomed luxury) yellow velvet chair-covers. Hot water-pipes were laid (only in the studio, but Victorian families were used to this). W.A.S. Benson was called in to design an additional studio across the end of the garden where the huge canvases could be stored. Ned also bought a new piano from the Grosvenors, offering to take it in exchange for a bundle of old clothes (to which Georgie added a postscript ‘Joking apart …’).11 The little Russell Place piano had lost its tone, and the replacement had offended by its walnut case – ‘striped like a tom-cat, by Jove!’ Morris called it. Altogether Burne-Jones spent £250 on redecoration this year, but almost at once he earned £
200 from the Brampton windows. At the same time, having noticed some disquieting heart symptoms – and although he treated every cold and headache as a drama, he never said much about these – he silently increased his life assurance.

  Margaret was fourteen – ‘unfairly pretty’, as Graham Robertson found her. She recognised calmly that she was growing up, and complained that her father’s portrait of her in a muslin dress gave her a flat chest. Oscar Wilde rowed her on the Thames, straw-hatted; she sat for Watts, and was the darling of her music-masters. There was no stage of life at which Margaret was not beautiful and composed, and none, up till now, at which Phil had not been unhappy. At Marlborough he had suffered from ‘long fits of apathy varied by half-hysterical times of religious anxiety, distressing to see’,12 and had at last been removed to study with a private coach. He was to go to Oxford and to be entrusted to Charlie Faulkner at University College. In 1878 Ned took him to Paris on what must have been an exceedingly dull trip with Crom and Sidney Colvin; Phil, aged seventeen, was taken to Punch and Judy in the Champs Elysées. When in 1880 he at last went up to Oxford he showed for the first time ‘simple animal pleasure in being alive’ and his parents, without any suspicion of what this might lead to, were for the moment grateful.

  On the domestic side Ned had sudden bursts of rashness: one day he dismissed the cook – though he described her as being twice as big as himself, and twelve times as big as Georgie – for being, as he put it, so ugly; in consequence he had nothing but bread and mutton-chops to offer Miss Stuart Wortley, who was due for lunch. The annual visit from Mr Jones was a trial, although Ned was glad to offer him a few weeks away from the cantankerous Miss Sampson. ‘My father is here and very trying, very – as parents are always – he sits and admires everything that belongs to me till I could beat him, and it makes me feel wicked and remorseful.’ Thirteen-year-old Rudyard Kipling, now at the United Services College with Crom as headmaster, spent part of every holiday at The Grange; Professor Norton’s children were often left there.

  Georgie, as Ned well knew, bore the burden of everything. About 1883 he began her portrait, a low-toned, quiet study with the children seen through a narrow door. Georgie’s eyes, in all their searching directness, are the focus of the picture. Like Mary Zambaco, and Janey in The Blue Silk Dress, she is reading a book and holding a flower, but the book is Gerard’s Herbal and the flower is heartsease, which, Gerard tells us, ‘growth in fields and in gardens also, and that oftentimes of itselfe: it is more gallant and beautiful than any of the wild ones.’ Ruskin’s Proserpina (1882), his strange ‘School Botany’, tells us that heartsease is the flower of those who love simply, ‘to the death’, and adds that ‘in daily life, one often sees married women as good as saints; but rarely, I think, unless they have a good deal to bear from their husbands.’

  13

  1878–84

  KING COPHETUA: THE STUDIO IN THE EIGHTIES

  The second and third spring shows of the Grosvenor Gallery established Burne-Jones as their leading painter, and their queerest and most controversial one. In 1878 he exhibited the Chant d’Amour and Laus Veneris, in 1879 The Annunciation, and in 1880 The Golden Stairs. Like all his pictures, except for the portraits, they were based on ideas and treatments that had lingered for years in his mind, a mind that was obliged to repeat certain obsessional patterns corresponding to the inner life. The enchantment of the willing victim, sleep, waiting, imprisonment, loneliness, guiding, rescue, the quest, losing and finding, tending the helpless, flying, sea-crossing, clinging together, the ritual procession and dance, love dominant and without pity, the haunting angel, the entry into life – these returned again and again in his tormenting daily experiences and in his painting, and hence, often with doubtful appropriateness, on the walls, windows and tapestries of his eager patrons.

  The Laus Veneris is a magnificent object, a craftsman’s showpiece, a reminder of Burne-Jones’s own saying that painting should be like goldsmiths’ work and that in times to come if even a square inch of it is dug up, it should be recognisable as an artifice. Venus’s draper, in glowing orange, has even been textured over the paint with a small round instrument. Stranger still, the dread hall of Venusberg is furnished by the firm, with a tapestry version of Ned’s Passing of Venus on the walls, de Morgan’s lustre tiles round the window, and the goddess reclining in a chair which might be from the firm’s catalogue. Yet all this is not incongruous; why should it be? It is Burne-Jones’s peculiar vision of the Venusberg. He had been allowing it to grow in his mind since 1861, and this second version had been painted largely during 1873–5. In Swinburne’s Laus Veneris the goddess weaves ‘exceeding pleasure out of extreme pain’; in Morris’s Earthly Paradise she is, most characteristically, transformed into a healthy naked girl and everything takes place in the open air; in 1876 Tannhaüser was given at Covent Garden. But to Burne-Jones, Venus is at the end of her strength. The studies for the head (at Fulham Public Library), are for the ‘sick Venus’. The knights who pass by the cold blue square of the window look in, but will not stop. The attendants wait with their music for a signal that never comes. As Henry James (still an ‘attentive spectator’) pointed out, they have a more innocent and vacant expression than the goddess whom they cannot cure. The Laus is a picture of the death of love, though the painter regrets the death. ‘You ask me if I have ever found temptation irresistible – no, never – if I have given in I have given in with my whole will, and meant to do it.’1

  The Golden Stairs, the great sensation of 1880, was a canvas even larger (nine foot by four) than the Laus Veneris, as though the painter’s world had expanded uncontrollably. The title is from Dante’s non vi si monta periscala de oro (no one may ascend the golden stair); it was the final form of a design which he had been struggling with under various titles – Music on the Stairs, The King’s Wedding – for over ten years. His feelings towards it varied, particularly when the main entrants into life – Margaret at the very top, Laura Lyttelton, May Morris (centre), Frances Graham (extreme left), Mary Stuart Wortley (the second to approach the door) – had taken their places on the stair. Handsome, discontented May Morris is central to the picture; not only Bernard Shaw, Cockerell wrote, but Stanley Baldwin fell in love with her, ‘and so did Burne-Jones’. Mary Gladstone, visiting The Grange on 29 March 1880, found Ruskin and Mr Hamilton (Graham’s partner) ‘quite mad, Mrs Birks with her scarlet shawl and locket, and May Morris with her beautiful straight features and parted unfrizzed hair’. From later remarks one can gather that May was rather less than tolerant of ‘Ned’s nonsense’. At the beginning of 1880 Ned was still writing to see if George Howard could suggest ‘a nice innocent damsel or two’ to fill up ‘the staircase picture’.2 Nevertheless, it remains a powerful image of whiteness, with its grand spiral movement down the stairs mysteriously suspended, and the growing tension of the faces approaching the door. Rossetti, who complained that Ned had ‘stolen’ the design of his unfinished Boat of Love, showed that he understood the meaning well enough, for Dante’s boat voyage is an invitation to a new stage of experience. Rossetti could have answered the questions which came from all over the world (some are in the columns of Notes and Queries for 1880) as to what the picture meant. Even Morris was applied to, but according to May Morris, replied with a grunt.

  The Golden Stairs was commissioned by new patrons, Constance and Cyril Flower (later Lord Battersea). Constance was a Rothschild, Lady Lindsay’s niece. In 1877 she married her impossibly handsome husband, ‘the irresistible man’; he was supposed to be the original of Eric (or Little by Little), and it was said that tailors and boot-makers came to beg him to reveal his secrets. Constance herself would have liked to build a House Beautiful in the slums of Battersea, Cyril’s new constituency, and to invite the working people to see her possessions. ‘It would have been a splendid experience’, she writes in her memoirs, ‘but it was not to be.’ Cyril preferred Surrey House, Marble Arch. He began to collect – he had been hard up for so long! – treasures innumera
ble. There were mistakes. In Rome, to Constance’s ‘utter amazement’ he suddenly bought Storey’s huge Sardanapalus; nothing could be done with it, it had to go to Scotland to be used as hewn marble. In Venice he had to be restrained from hiring Desdemona’s Palace on the Grand Canal. His tastes modified slowly. Burne-Jones liked the generous Constance, Cyril not quite so much; anyone who wants to study the art of refusing invitations gracefully might study his letters to Cyril Flower.

  The Golden Stairs took time; Burne-Jones put his patron off with the ease of long practice.

  The picture of many maidens – foolish virgins – or by whatever name it is to be called – goes on nearly every day … I should like you to see it when it is nearer finish – I have drawn so many toes lately that when I shut my eyes I see a perfect shower of them …

  In later years, when they had long been owners of the picture, the Batterseas met on a cruise two French ‘suffragists’.

  They were quite modern in all their tastes, and proclaimed above all their allegiance to Rossetti, Watts, and above all others, Burne-Jones. ‘Ah, how beautiful is the picture called “The Golden Stairs”,’ said the older lady. ‘I am so glad,’ I replied, ‘I have it.’ ‘Indeed,’ said the lady, ‘and what may be the size of the engraving?’ ‘Oh,’ I answered, ‘there are many sizes, some very fine ones, quite large, others small and inexpensive … but I have the picture itself.’ ‘You have the original,’ screamed the lady. ‘Then you knew him – you knew the master?’ ‘Yes, of course, he was a very great friend of ours.’ ‘A friend! then you belong to us, you belong to le monde bohémien!’