Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The beggar maid’s gaze is without question Georgie’s own, although it is not for nothing that it recalls the Justice of Giotto’s Capella dell’ Arena. The head of the king is, just as unquestionably, Burne-Jones himself. Rooke described how, when he was working on the scaffolding in front of the great canvas, he overdid things and ‘laid in the king’s head perilously near to a cariacature of his’,17 – at which, to his embarrassment, ‘the Master’ smiled. To Georgie, the picture ‘contained more of his distinctive qualities than any other he did’, and she persuaded herself that it represented the scorn of worldly wealth. Certainly we cannot miss in it the truth that Newman and Ruskin had taught Burne-Jones. But the king needs no reproof, for he already knows that his gold, though real, is irrelevant. And to say that the picture expresses the painter’s consciousness that for thirty years he had been subjected to the test of the highest purity and truth he knew – and that he could not feel he had met the test – does not lessen its significance. To Burne-Jones the beggar maid, totally indifferent to the darkly glowing wealth around her, was ‘a queen, such as queens ought to be’.

  The Cophetua, which caused a great sensation, was bought by Lord Wharncliffe, a cousin of Norman Grosvenor’s wife, and despatched to their Yorkshire seat, Wortley Hall.18 The estate, with its farms and moorlands, extended for thirty thousand acres, but near the house it was covered with a faint greyness from the Sheffield collieries. The Wharncliffes themselves ‘were people whose mode of life could only have existed in the late Victorian era. They moved with majesty and had rigid and exacting standards of behaviour and conduct.’ It is difficult to think of them under the disturbing eyes of the beggar maid, but in 1899, on the death of Lord Wharncliffe, the picture was bought for the Tate. This was a disappointment for Georgie, who wished it to go to the National Gallery.

  14

  1884–90

  THE ROYAL ACADEMY: ‘TO THINK, JONES, OF YOUR COMING TO THIS!’

  The large canvases of the eighties would not have been possible without reorganisation of the work of the studio. Burne-Jones was not, in the ordinary sense of the word, a good organiser. But he was a very good teacher, attracted followers almost without meaning to, and had a peculiar passive ability of eliminating things which caused him inconvenience. On a modest scale, his studio during the eighties became a centre of teaching and production – on a modest scale, because he had none of the problems of the great Victorian ‘machines’ – the royal portraitists, for example, had to employ a team to produce the fifty or sixty copies needed for distant embassies. Neither, of course, had Burne-Jones any ambition to join the ranks of the artist princes of Kensington. Millais’s studio at 2 Palace Gate was reached by a flight of marble stairs overlaid with a Persian carpet, and was hung with Beauvais tapestry and curtains of ruby velvet. In 1886 ‘Tad’ moved into his new house in Grove End Road where the studio had onyx walls and a silver ceiling (for reflected light) and was connected with the house by the famous golden staircase (really brass, ‘Tad’ insisted, when begging letters arrived asking for a small piece of the banisters). Leighton’s house was complete, and the fountain played in the tiled Arab hall. A tour of these studios, increasingly popular as a carriage airing on Sunday, found Burne-Jones offering rush-bottomed chairs in his studio which looked homely by contrast. He never showed his ‘props’. Some of them were very simple – a wooden pole with a cross-beam did duty for a tree. Others, such as armour, or Perseus’s winged shoes, were specially made, sometimes at home, ‘so that what eventually gets on to my canvas is a reflection of a reflection of something purely imaginary’. Photographs show how his unfinished canvases looked – tall, blocked-in female forms with only the whites of their eyes heightened, waiting like Maeterlinck’s souls of the unborn, for their deliverance. Briar Rose occupied one wall completely.

  Ned’s system, as he explained to Stephens, was very simple. If more than a certain number of Sunday visitors came, he hid and listened to their comments.1 This eventually led, according to Comyns Carr, to his being flattened one day behind his own door.

  There were now three studios in operation: in the house, in the garden, and the Avalon at Campden Hill Road. The trouble was, as Burne-Jones complained to Watts, that his assistants could prepare in a month what took him twelve months to finish.2 He left a fortnight between stages for drying, each stage menaced by cleaning and dusting. Most of his assistants, including Edward Clifford and Fairfax Murray, set up for themselves, and even Rooke left in 1879 and bought ‘a sublime mansion’, but he returned by the day to take charge of everything. Rooke knew the mysterious mixture of varnish, spike oil and a drop of linseed which they would shake up like salad dressing with the words ‘let lunacy begin’. He understood the careful checks and rechecks which Burne-Jones made on each drawing before it was transferred, although it is surprising how little apparatus was used. Rothenstein, when he met Rooke in 1904, showed him how to use a T-square and was ‘surprised it should be new to him’.

  Rooke also dealt with casual callers. Young artists with portfolios to show were welcome at any time, but young ladies from Passionate Brompton were a special category, and Rooke had to manage as best he could during his master’s frequent retreats. Burne-Jones was particularly frightened of Evelyn Pickering, Spencer Stanhope’s cousin, who later married William de Morgan – ‘a plain lady, whom I never look at when I talk to her;.3 But even plainness did not matter if Ned felt that he could be of help, and give back even a hundredth part of what Mantegna had given to him.

  The press of work in the studio was partly the result of the sheer size of the pictures, often over six foot in height. Special openings were made in the wall of the garden studio to pass them through, and scaffolding was constructed so that two people could work on them at once.

  The glass designs of the eighties are fewer, but rich in colour, sometimes spreading right across the panes with overwhelming effect, although rather in contradiction of Morris’s idea that ‘the more the design will enable us to break up the pieces, and the more mosaic-like it is, the better we like it’. Some are brilliantly stylised, like the sinuous ‘Pelican’ for Ingestre. But Morris’s new preoccupations meant that much more was left to his chief assistant, J.H. Dearle, and a certain friction arose. ‘Nov. 1884 raising of widow’s son and passage of Red Sea for Kircaldy,’ Ned entered into his book. ‘These were totally unsuitable to spaces and if this occurs again I will not be responsible for the language I use nor the property I smash.’ In 1884, however, he designed the first of his windows for St Philip’s, Birmingham, an Ascension (‘my fiftieth treatment of the subject’), and glass for his own little house at Rottingdean.

  The 1880s also saw a great expansion of the studio as a workshop of applied art. Burne-Jones valued craftsmen, and could get on with them. ‘A man who is a good carpenter is well educated, and a man who can smithy a horseshoe is well educated, and a man who knows what other people has said about these things is not well educated at all.’4 With the help of books lent by Stephens, he designed jewellery which, like the Flower Book, showed he had not lost his feeling for small-scale work. Ruskin ordered a hawthorn cross in pure gold to be given to the May Queen at Whitelands Training College. Burne-Jones tried to make Broadwoods let him redesign their pianos altogether, and worked out combinations of gesso, paint and gilding for wall decoration. Not all of these were successful, and nobody liked his attempt to fasten thin sheets of metal on to the armour in the still unfinished Perseus series. Perhaps Balfour would have been prepared to settle for anything in order to get his pictures finished and delivered. But it seems that he himself objected to the severed head of the Gorgon, which Ned had introduced to counterbalance the rich nudes, and once again everything had to be altered.

  The studio also designed silverwork; at one point Nora Hallé was making a little fire in one corner of the room to heat the metal. In 1885 Burne-Jones received an important commission – a set of wedding presents in beaten silver for a young friend of Frances Graham’s, Laura
Tennant.

  Laura was the daughter of a very wealthy Glasgow bleach manufacturer. With her younger sister Margot she was the presiding spirit of Glen, the great mock-baronial hall in Peebleshire, and a London house full of precious objects in Grosvenor Square. Laura – not unlike Ruskin’s Rose La Touche – was a fascinater, a dazzling young woman one moment and at the next as pale and pitiful as a suffering child. Everyone fell in love with her, and indeed she had to be loved – by the crossing-sweeper, by the scullery-maid – or she felt something wrong with her world. To call her an outrageous flirt, as many did, would not give the brilliance of her response to life; one might say, with Mary Gladstone, that Laura was sometimes ‘dangerously near forbidden ground’. But generous Mary added that to sit for an hour in a room with Laura was happiness enough.

  This Burne-Jones had an opportunity to do when she came to tea, and with her infallible instinct for pleasing, ‘half-asked’ him to help her towards a new understanding of beauty, as he had helped Frances. But Ned had learned, if not much, at least some wisdom. ‘She is a dear little lady,’ he wrote to Frances, after making some delicate pencil studies of Laura’s head, with its strange eyelids closing from below, like a kitten’s. He only felt, when she came to tell him about her engagement to Alfred Lyttelton, that there should be some gesture made ‘to appease the envy of the watchers’. The marriage seemed indeed to be a story of perfect happiness, wealth and beauty. But a year later Laura was dead of a haemorrhage after the birth of her baby.

  The memorial tablet which Burne-Jones designed – one of the studio’s first experiments in gesso – was the effigy of a peacock, a symbol of resurrection in the Byzantine art which he had closely studied for the mosaics. ‘And the laurel grows out of the tomb’, he explained, ‘and bursts through the tomb with the determination to go on living, and refuses to be dead.’ The idea was magnificent but formal, and perhaps not quite as suitable for Laura as the epitaph she composed for herself – ‘Laura Mary, child of the sky’.

  As 1885 opened, Burne-Jones wrote to George Howard that ‘Morris growls rather these days’ and that he himself was sighing heavily for ancient times.5 ‘I sing paeans of delight to myself that Morris is quit of Hyndman but I am also heartily sorry for Morris who does win my admiration at every turn,’ he added, following at a rueful distance the violent disputes of a body dedicated to universal brotherhood. Morris, who had had to take his Socialist League out of the Federation, wrote to Georgie on Christmas Day that ‘it came off to the full as damned as I expected’. In these letters to Georgie he seems, in a sense, to offer her all that he does, and it is from them that we hear about his losses of money and temper; health too, for since 1878 he had been subject to black-outs. It did not help matters that Charlie Faulkner had followed him loyally into the movement, and soon began to show, in his turn, the effects of overwork and public disapproval. ‘Morris told me the people hadn’t any decent leading’, Burne-Jones told Rooke, ‘but he, who should have had the best, had to give in to noisy rancorous creatures … it was too much for Charlie Faulkner – it killed him by the most painful of all deaths, lasting for years.’

  Morris came even less now to The Grange, and left ‘unsped by sympathy’ to preach at street corners. Janey appeared by herself, ‘a glorious wreck’ in Mary Gladstone’s words, at The Grange garden parties. Burne-Jones faced the years ahead at the height of his fame and with a studio in full production, but without the old sense of comradeship. ‘Bare is back without brother behind.’

  He remained, of course, as Henry James found him, ‘exquisite in mind and talk’. James sensed his restlessness and tactful as ever, took him down to Bournemouth to amuse the convalescent R.L. Stevenson. This went well – much better than when Richmond asked R.L.S. and Ned to dinner, and got both of them to discuss what crimes they would like to commit; the cook, by arrangement, then came in and announced that ‘a constable has called, and wants to see one of you gents’. Burne-Jones, veteran of practical jokes since the sixties, was unmoved, but Stevenson was ‘very much upset’. Burne-Jones, as might be expected, appreciated R.L.S. as a teller of tales, was glad when in Catriona he ‘made a woman at last’, and regretted that he was too busy to do the illustrations to A Child’s Garden of Verses. This, indeed, was an opportunity lost.

  The Lewises, too, offered him the solace of their house, Ashley Cottage, at Walton. Here their walk through the woods (George Lewis in tweeds) was interrupted when Burne-Jones suddenly saw, outside one of the keeper’s cottages, a girl with ‘oat-coloured hair’, about twelve years old, ‘her hair paler than her face, and her eyes paler than her hair’. He refused to disturb her when he found she was shy, and stood memorising her face, just as in London he would watch tiny children dancing to the barrel organ, fascinated, until the last step.

  In 1885 Burne-Jones took the decision to hyphenate his name. This may have been a mistake, for if (like Madox Brown and Holman Hunt) he had left it as it was he would have spared himself the scorn of Whistler who continued to refer to him as Mr Jones, and of later critics who have accused him, of all people, of delusions of grandeur. ‘My dear Steev,’ he wrote to Stephens,

  It is quite right and nothing that isn’t a fact.

  I have just stuck in at one point the name ‘Burne’ having long ago, in the natural yearning of mortal man not to be lost in the million of Joneses, put another family name before it, dear Steev, but solely from dread of annihilation,

  Yours affec–

  Ned6

  Looking back over the years, he could remember Augusta Jones the model; the great John Jones collection over which he had advised the South Kensington Museum; Owen Jones the designer; Albert Jones, Rooke’s brother-in-law, who had come to work in the studio and inconveniently developed smallpox. The playwright Henry Arthur Jones (who nearly changed his name when Mrs Pat Campbell told him it was ‘incurably common’) became successful (and began negotiations for ‘Tad’s’ old house) about 1882. But Ned would not much have minded being thought incurably common. Morris was disgusted by the change and referred to it as little as possible. The real consideration in the case was Phil.

  Phil had come down from Oxford without a degree. His main talent, apart from getting up charades, was comic illustration, and Burne-Jones, fated always to make mistakes with his son, begged him not to do. Phil amiably agreed therefore to become a painter and to train in his father’s studio. But he, too, had his dreams of the unattainable. His ambition was to cut a dash in the Prince of Wales’s set.

  No greater irony could be imagined for the son of the hesitant Ned and Georgie, whose fierce scorn of Vanity Fair remained undimmed through her pilgrimage. But that was what Phil did want; he wanted to escort Lillie Langtry and to owe bills to tailors and wine-merchants and to follow the semi-compulsory, heavily well-fed circulatory movements of society from London to country houses to Le Touquet and back again. It was not a matter of snobbery, but a highly-tuned theatrical sense – society provided a sumptuous and often scandalous show to the public, as though on a lighted stage – that, and an excitable need to se faire valoir. For this Phil needed constant supplies of money, and above all, not to be called Jones.

  The change of name was the first of a number of decisions where one can feel Burne-Jones losing direction, in everything except his painting. On the evening of 4 June 1885, when he had dropped asleep from exhaustion on the drawing-room sofa, the door-bell rang and a servant came to say that a man was in the hall with a message that Mr Burne-Jones was elected into the Royal Academy. Georgie, who thought it might be a joke (if so, it would have been quite in the style of Comyns Carr), was annoyed and sent the man away; this was rather hard luck for the messenger, presumably one of the Academy models who, by tradition, brought the news and received a sovereign. Next day, however, a letter arrived from the President, Fred Leighton, referring to an ‘act of justice’ at Burlington House – Ned had been elected by ‘the largest majority I ever saw … I am not aware that any other case exists of an Artist being electe
d who has … pointedly abstained from exhibiting on our walls.’ Burne-Jones, of course, had never put his name forward. He had been proposed, it seemed, by an academician he had never met, Briton Rivière, ‘and this touched and surprised him, giving rise to the idea that there might really be in the Royal Academy, without his knowledge, an element of sympathy with his work and his aims.’

  If Ned really thought this he must have blinded himself in a strange manner to the spirited in-fighting of Academy politics. What had really been happening? Certainly Burne-Jones had many old friends at the R.A. – Millais, Alma Tadema, Watts and Poynter (Prinsep was still an Assistant); Henry Wells, the ‘election manager’ of the Academy, had bought some of Ned’s very earliest work. Leighton, besides his personal good will, had an uneasy feeling, a kind of nagging conscience, about what Burne-Jones was doing. Whistler did not worry him, nor did Impressionism, but Burne-Jones, and the movement for which he was held responsible, were another matter. Towards the end of his life he pointed doubtfully at a small copper lantern at Walter Crane’s house and asked, ‘Is that Arts and Crafts?’ To bring Burne-Jones into the fold would be generous, and Leighton was always that, but it would also be reassuring, particularly after the success of Cophetua.

  But his proposer had been Briton Rivière, and the general opinion can be gathered from Beatrix Potter’s diaries: