Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The Golden Stairs, bequeathed by Lady Battersea to the nation, languishes now in the basement of the Tate Gallery.

  The reference to engravings shows that Burne-Jones had entered into that strange extension of a painter’s life-work, reproductions, the shrunken ikons that disperse him through time and space into the musée imaginaire. Like every other Victorian artist, he tried vainly to keep this process under his own control, and both he and Watts (whose work was never reproduced before the Grosvenor exhibitions) were fortunate in being introduced at this time to the photographer Fred Hollyer. Leighton was responsible for this. He recommended Hollyer, who made photographic reproductions of Burne-Jones drawings so delicate that they sometimes pass today for originals. In dealing with Hollyer, and later with the engraver Jasinksi, Ned found himself unexpectedly lucky.

  Reproductions of The Golden Stairs were advertised next to Floriline Hair Tonic and Epps’s Cocoa. Burne-Jones accepted this, still hoping, in this way or any way, to serve a wide public without alteration of his ideals. From 1877 the firm no longer supplied new windows for ancient churches. Morris, in his noble fury against restoration, had made it a principle not to do so, and the Burne-Jones angels for Salisbury Cathedral were the last commission of this kind that Morris himself accepted.3 For modern churches Ned of course continued to work, and from the Ionides family came the idea that he might design not only the glass but the mosaic for the Greek community’s new church, Santa Sophia, in Bayswater. Burne-Jones told Constantine that this was ‘the dream of his life’ – a dream that compassed his memories of Torcello and St Mark’s; but the rest of the community did not know the artist, and the scheme was turned down. It was not until much later that Alexander, Constantine’s son, was able to get his revenge: these same protesters tried to introduce glaring lights into Santa Sophia, and he was able to ask them ‘whether the Seven Lamps of Architecture were to be extinguished in Bayswater?’ Meanwhile a new opportunity came Burne-Jones’s way when Street, who had been commissioned to build the American Episcopal church in Rome, asked him to design mosaics for the apse and choir. The scheme, as might be expected, took shape slowly in Ned’s mind, dim with muted gold and crowned with angels. His notes in the British Museum ‘secret book of Designs’ show that he studied the hierarchy of angels from an account of the Iviron monastery. At an early stage he decided on a Christ in Majesty, with a dark empty space left for the fallen Lucifer. A letter to George Howard, however, even at this early date, shows doubts. ‘The Roman church I shall give up. Street is dead that would have come between me and the cloth and helped me with the workmen.’4 The ‘cloth’ might, he felt, object to his conception of the cross as a living tree, putting out leaves as a sign of rebirth. Yet even after Street’s death in 1881 he struggled on with the commission. A long correspondence opened with the Compagnia de Venezia-Murano. The first sample work was disastrous, the tesserae were the wrong size, the Italian workmen had (of course) given the angels blonde hair and pink faces, whereas Ned wanted ‘the hair dark, the faces sweetly pale – the eyebrows straight, the darkness under them steady and solemn’. Rooke, who took yearly sketching trips to Italy, had to do what he could in Venice; Morris helped to sort out the colours. ‘I wonder if it would have been better if I had sent no instructions at all … I will unsay all my old directions and bid them to do it in their own accursed way – perhaps that would be best … O for God’s sake let them forget all I said,’ Ned wrote, and in fact he was inexperienced in the new media; this is suggested in the dignified reply of Signor Castellani, the director of the company: ‘It is not the mosaic as we are used to make, or as we understand.’ Although harmony was established and the designs were finished by 1884, the scheme was still not complete at Burne-Jones’s death.

  At home, Burne-Jones was much concerned with what he called his ‘purchases’, that is, his ceaseless gentle pressure on the authorities to buy works of art for the nation. ‘All our pictures all together to [sic] all England couldn’t cost more than a couple of ironclads that are a mistake in two years’ time,’ he wrote to Mary Gladstone in July 1882. Funds must be put aside regularly. In 1880 he tackled Joseph Chamberlain on the question of founding the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. In February 1882, the Duke of Hamilton decided to sell the Hamilton Palace collection through Christie’s since, as The Times put it, ‘tall chimneys pouring forth noxious vapour rendered the Palace every year more unsuitable as the residence of a great nobleman’. Burne-Jones would have liked those who worked in the noxious vapour to have something beautiful to see. He accompanied George Howard and Fred Burton to the auction, and, against competition from the Louvre, the National Gallery acquired the Botticelli Assumption and Adoration of the Magi, the Mantegna panels, and (though certainly not at Ned’s suggestion) the Velazquez Philip IV. The Botticelli illustrations to Dante, much to his distress, they let go, but he was able to subscribe to reproductions by the Berlin Photographic Company, when they began to issue them in 1884.

  Apart from these larger concerns, Burne-Jones was, as he had always been, endlessly patient with private charities and personal appeals. In 1881 we find him offering to teach tile-painting to a friend of Mary Gladstone’s who had suffered a bad loss. ‘I am not thinking of solace or any such matter – the kind of painting I mean sharpens and doesn’t blunt memory.’ He was also active in the case of Joseph Skipsey, a collier who had been down the pits since the age of seven. ‘… And I could not bear to watch him look at my pictures … the look of his face being satisfied with colour.’5 Ned hated the idea that Skipsey (or anyone else) might feel he was being patronised. Not money, but ‘the upper air’ was needed. With George Howard’s help, he got Skipsey the job of caretaker at Shakespeare’s house at Stratford.

  Beneath everything he did was the uneasy longing to go back to Italy. Fairfax Murray and Rooke continued to send back drawings and photographs, and there was really nothing to stop him travelling out with them, or with George Howard, or Spencer Stanhope, or Edward and Aggie Poynter, or even with the Gladstone family, touring under the direction of Sir Stephen Glynne, who ‘had the churchums’. The Rome commission made it almost necessary for him to go out, yet he did not go.

  Work with Morris was the solid foundation of his life. He did not go down much to Kelmscott, which was now held on a joint tenancy with F.S. Ellis. Although he was not at all demanding in the matter of comfort, Ned could not quite face the prospect of coarse fishing on the flood-waters and the house itself, where half the kitchen had been turned into a stable for the Iceland pony. Janey was often in Italy. She was much aged,6 and indeed Morris himself had begun to look ten years older than his real age. But he continued to come to The Grange several times a week to discuss joint undertakings, and from the end of 1881, when he moved his workshops to Merton Abbey, Burne-Jones was called upon for figure designs for tapestry. There were important private commissions. The Musica panel, yellow wool embroidery on linen, was designed for Alecco Ionides and his Holland Park house – and George Howard commissioned not only tapestry but the entire decoration of Palace Green from the firm.

  Palace Green had become largely George’s domain, while Rosalind, who hated it as a centre of idle Bohemians without commitment to the causes of temperance or radical policies in Ireland, kept largely to Naworth. Her little-used boudoir at Palace Green, however, was planned with particular care. It was to be hung with printed cotton in deep rose to bring out the blue-grey of Ned’s Annunciation, while the Psyche series were set as a frieze into the dining-room walls. But the work went along very slowly. ‘I am bound to ask your pardon for having neglected this job,’ Morris wrote in 1879. ‘I wanted to make it a delight … I gather that you are disappointed,’ Ned continues in 1882.7 At length Walter Crane was called in, as he tells us in his Reminiscences, to help finish the paintings, ‘in all stages of completion’, and to add raised details in gilt; the Psyche Sacrificed, however, Ned declared he must finish himself. Crane, driven almost to exasperation, was still more disconcerted w
hen Burne-Jones ‘pretended to assume the manner and language of the ordinary British workman “on the job” … and, when Mr Howard came to see the progress of the work, insinuated the broadest hints about prospective cigars and drinks we were to enjoy at our host’s expense. ‘The decoration was finally completed in 1882 and celebrated with a Christmas party more in the spirit of the 1860s, with the gloomy Poynter and the imperious Countess of Airlie joining in a game of dumb crambo.

  But neither the work nor the companionship could hide the truth that Morris, in the early eighties, was growing away and apart from his friend. After the collapse of the Eastern Question committee, Morris’s energy had been expended, almost ferociously, in a dozen ways. He founded the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings in 1878, took up de Morgan’s idea of refacing London with ceramic tiles (the whole city, Morris said, could be hosed down every night with clean water), experimented in weaving, dyeing and indigo-printing, threw himself into the business of the National Liberal League. But the evident truth that Gladstone’s ministry of 1880 countenanced war in the Transvaal, expansion of Empire, an Irish Coercion Bill and the ‘development’ of industrial cities drove Morris, once and for all, out of love with Liberal politics. In his public lectures he began to call for an end to an exclusive art lavished on a few thousand ‘digesting machines’ of the fortunate classes. ‘I do not want art for the few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.’ With the nagging consciousness that the firm did in fact design for the relatively few who could afford it, he proceeded with magnificent simplicity from one step to another. If neither art nor politics could redeem society, and he had tried both, then society itself must change. The future must lie with Socialism.

  Here Burne-Jones could not follow him. His conscience had a different history. It had been formed by the long struggle, against many difficulties, out of the povery of the back shop. ‘Some day it will all change violently, and I hate and dread it but I say beforehand that it will thoroughly serve everybody right,’ was Ned’s honest, but not heroic opinion. More seriously, he held that the same rules which govern individuals in their relations to each other should govern society: decency, sympathy, and respect for privacy. But the thought of a serious difference with Morris sickened him. He noticed a deterioration, even at this stage, in his friend’s health. A tower of strength in daily life, Morris now became ‘sad after meat’, that is to say, he lost grip after the large dinner he usually ate. 1880 was another ‘season of dreadful dreaming’. Night after night Ned seemed to arrive at a house in a dull cathedral town, recalled he had once lived in great misery there, was forced to go up the steps and then turned back at the door. He also dreamed of being suffocated.8

  He was frightened by Morris’s growing stoutness – he could hardly lace up his boots, and one of Ned’s little drawings of him in the British Museum is labelled ‘all more arse’. It was this fear, only just disguised as a joke, which combined with even deeper ones to produce Burne-Jones’s fantasies of Fat Ladies (or Prominent Women). Both Georgie and Frances Horner strongly disapproved of these, yet he continued to do them for nearly twenty years. There are pig-like Fat Ladies in bed, in the Turkish baths, chased naked by a swarm of bees, bending over his easel and stifling him, invading the beath at Rottingdean. The horror of fatness, which he shared with his father, was obsessional – he could hardly bear to see the Sunday joint with its ‘lappets of fat’ brought into the kitchen. Rubens’ naked women nauseated him. The recurrent dream, which he described in 1894, explains itself: ‘Sometimes I marry very undesirably, hairy fat women and wake disgusted.’9 To go to bed with a Prominent Woman was a lurking horror which made a mockery of beauty and sexuality alike.

  It seems likely that 1880 was not a year in which the mysterious man in black came up to him in the street and whispered ‘God bless you’. 1881, the following year, ‘seemed’, Georgie wrote, ‘from its effects to have been more than twelve months in length, and in the end Edward was a distinctly older man’. The failure of sympathy with Morris, together with the news of Rossetti – who had come back to Chelsea half-crippled under the shadow of a terminal illness – left Burne-Jones ‘tired, depressed, confused, stupid’. The bright ones of his youth were fading. He began to work on the design for a picture which meant in the end more to him than any other, the Sleep of Arthur in Avalon.

  It was to be commemorative of his own dead kings and the disaster which the world would suffer at their loss, not to be amended till the grievous wound was healed, and human beings realised that what they had thrown away was in fact what they needed most. The sleep of Arthur implies his reawakening, if the world would listen.

  The design, the last thing he ever worked on in this life, never recovered the strength of its early stages. At the back of Burne-Jones’s mind were the long slanting verticals of the mourning queens, the horizontal of the wounded king, moving in a magic boat through blank, motionless clouds and waves to Avalon. These appear in early sketches. As they disappeared, to be replaced by the island itself, the picture grew in size; it was evident that a long struggle was ahead, and an outside studio at Campden Hill Road was rented so that it could be worked on alone. By January 1885 he had to write to the long-suffering George Howard, who had commissioned the work, that Avalon was getting very expensive – ‘quite £3000’ – and suggested keeping the large version (he had perhaps always intended to do this) and painting a smaller one for Naworth. This was to be a ‘simpler scheme’, with apple-trees in the background and a few figures ‘life-size at least’,10 and the sketch (which is now in the National Museum of Wales) shows that it would have resulted in the finest picture of all. The water laps in the foreground, the seven separate figures stand apart, each deep in their own grief, two sentries look out across the sea, and above all there are the apple trees from which the island gets its name. These link it with the vanished days at the Red House, and Morris’s Pomona:

  I am the ancient Apple Queen

  As once I was so am I now

  For evermore a hope unseen

  Betwixt the blossom and the bough.

  In April 1882 Rossetti died at the inappropriate lodgings at Birchington where he had been taken in a last search for health. He had been destroying himself, on and off, for the last twenty years. Shields came to break the news to Ned who started out for the funeral but collapsed on the way. It was some kind of consolation to find that he was mentioned in Gabriel’s will as ‘my friend’. William Michael, relenting, sent Gabriel’s spectacles and two or three of his paintbrushes as a memento ‘if I needed to be reminded of him, which I never shall’, Ned wrote, asking if it was possible to buy ‘some little drawing of Lizzie’s for Georgie, who cherishes her memory very dearly’.11 With Fred Burton and Dicky Doyle he attended the sad Rossetti sale and the memorial exhibition at Burlington House. Old friends and new met; Ellen Terry was there in a ‘hat and cloak of rough ulster, ignoring the gazes of the crowd’ but so were Stephens and Leyland. ‘Tennyson sought peace and got it’, Burne-Jones told Rooke, ‘while Rossetti sought tragedy and tragic his life was.’12

  During the summer, this tragedy of long estrangement and death gave way to the tragi-comedy of Mr Jones. The old man – he was now eighty – had suffered so much from Miss Sampson that Ned had brought him down from Birmingham and settled him in Ealing. He called on his father often, and never thought of him as lonely. They were still linked by the memory of the dead wife and mother who was spoken of only in whispers. But Mr Jones probably missed much more keenly the daily tyranny of Miss Sampson. One day in 1883 when Ned called in at his lodgings his father quietly told him he was going to marry the cook.

  Burne-Jones found this sudden reversal of everything he had been taught to believe – the silences, the hallowed graveyard walks – exceedingly hard to swallow. When the old man and his new wife wanted to return to Birmingham, Georgie wrote, ‘we did not oppose it’.

  On 13 January 1883, Morris and Burne-Jones went to Oxford together on what should ha
ve been one of the golden moments of both their lives: Exeter had offered them honorary fellowships, and Ruskin, who had taken up the Slade Professorship again, was there to greet his pupils. But we may suspect that Morris had gone there only to please his friend. Four days later he enrolled himself as a member of the Democratic Federation. It was, he said, ‘the only society I could find which is definitely socialistic’. With the help of F.S. Ellis he began selling his precious books, devoting the proceeds to the funds of the Federation. Another sacrifice was Hughes’s April Love. In the following year he was too busy to come to The Grange for an evening every week, and even when he came, Burne-Jones wrote to Norton, ‘we are silent about many things, and we used to be silent about nothing.’

  To this desertion Burne-Jones could not reconcile himself. His pain was not lessened by having known, for more than two years, that it was likely to happen. In fact, like most human beings, he felt that having suffered in advance he should not be called upon to do so again. He did not question Morris’s nobility in offering all that he had in the name of humanity itself. But, having watched the political temperament far more closely than Morris had ever done, he did not believe that much could be gained by any party, even a revolutionary one. He dreaded the rancour inseparable from new movements and could only hope against hope that Morris would teach them largeness of soul. Knowing his friend’s emotional balance very well, and not being deceived, as so many were, by his exterior shaggy toughness, he feared for his health and even his life. Above all he suffered from a deep sense of waste. Morris was born a poet – it was the loss of the poet, not the designer, that he felt most, for the firm itself was busier than ever. They had set out together to make the world less ugly, they had survived the emotional crisis of ten years back, and where was the quest to end now? Morris, the poet of the ‘white-flowered hawthorn brake’, was soon to celebrate May Day only as a time when: