Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  June 4 1885, such news, Burne-Jones elected an Associate. Mr Millais says they should have all sorts. Old Barlow is indignant. The fact is, the Academy is jealous of outsiders, and will not, if avoidable, take in any one who may be a rival, which induced Breton [sic] to suggest Burne-Jones who is not likely to paint animals.

  Unaware of this, Ned and Georgie debated seriously. There was the possibility of wounding Watts and Leighton, the difficulty of exhibiting things in two places at once – to this Leighton quite stiffly pointed out that Ned would surely not slight a body of men who had sought to honour him, by sending more to the Grosvenor than to the Academy. Graham was the man to advise, but he was in the last stages of his final illness and could only give wavering congratulations; George Lewis, for once, had nothing to suggest. Morris, in a letter to Georgie, was uncompromisingly against. But wasn’t the battle still in the salon, as it had been at the O.W.S.? Watts wrote that Ned could help the cause of art more effectually inside than outside. And the warmth of the invitation, after the wretched ‘silences’ between himself and Morris, made him, as he admitted to Watts, feel like a man who is asked into a house as he passes by. The next day he sent his acceptance of the ‘unlooked-for honour’ and though he followed it with other letters offering to ‘yield up his place’ he was now an Associate of the Royal Academy.

  The feeling of warmth was by no means universal. ‘I have not the slightest objection to him being in the Royal Academy,’ wrote Luke Fildes, who felt that a ‘dead set’ had been made at the election. ‘I only feel that there has been an indecent haste in rushing him in and a very slavish bowing down to him as soon as he graciously condescended to be elected … it will make all the grosvenorites more offensive than before.’ Here spoke the serried ranks of Frith, Marcus Stone, ‘Clothes’ Horsley and the rank-and-file like Stacy Marks, whose first Academy picture had been Toothache in the Olden Times.

  Burne-Jones, however, was used to opposition. The point was that his presence in the Academy of 1885 was an anomaly. He was a minor master, but still a master, dedicated to the idea that art speaks, not from surface to surface, but from soul to soul. Even Punch felt this. The Punch ‘Swarry at Burlington House, June 27, 1885’ shows Leighton bowing suavely in the foreground, Oscar Wilde in Art Dress in the middle distance, and at the back the bust of Ruskin turning grimly to a bust of Burne-Jones: ‘To think, Jones, of your coming to this!’

  The question of his first Academy exhibit would have to be faced, but not till the following spring, and that summer all considerations gave way to the long drawn-out suffering of William Graham. Although Rossetti had felt many years earlier that this great collector had lost the will to live, he had been active to the end, until he was too ill to move, in helping his friends the artists. One of the last things he did was to negotiate the commission for Briar Rose with Agnew’s. When he died on 16 July 1885, Burne-Jones sent some small pictures to be buried with him, recalling in this queer romantic gesture the Graham who had gone up to one of his half-finished canvases and kissed it because it was ‘to his mind’. These small pictures are now in the coffin in Glasgow cemetery.

  The great Graham collection now came on the market, and it was at the Graham sales in the following year that Burne-Jones’s position as painter was confirmed, his pictures fetching £17,000 at auction. Encouraged by this, and by the steps which Burne-Jones, A.R.A., seemed to be taking towards an official career, the Birmingham Society of Artists wrote to offer him the presidency. Ned, who had refused the same offer in 1880, and who had never felt like having anything to do with administration since the failure of the Hogarth Club, now accepted cautiously; he mustn’t be asked, however, to speak or lecture, or in fact to act in any way as a president. But he was anxious, as always, to see the schools of design and to meet the students, and in October he paid a week’s visit to Birmingham. A visit to the Choyces brought back the past and so did a call on Miss Sampson; he had kept his promise and had seen that she was comfortably off in her old age. His host was that great Birmingham worthy, W.H. Kenrick, the Liberal M.P. – ‘Liberal as the sea is salt’ – and chairman of committees innumerable, who had been the great force behind the recent opening of the city’s art gallery. Birmingham was now a city of opportunities of the only kind Ned cared about. No one there need now grow up without pictures. While his letter of thanks to Kenrick is rather extravagant in its dream of ‘a city of white stone, full of brave architecture’, he was justified in looking forward to a great complex of libraries and museums, and he undertook to do two more windows for St Philip’s. He could not, fortunately enough, foresee that Birmingham’s red brick would in the course of time be turned into white concrete.

  He returned to the insoluble problem of the Rome mosaics, and the yet more pressing one of his Academy picture. He consulted no one about the subject, apparently not even Watts who, it is true, was mildly busy, having been taken in hand by the energetic lady who was to marry him next year. Burne-Jones decided to reserve Flamma Vestalis, the Morning of the Resurrection and the fine Delphic Sibyl, painted in a glowing burnt orange which recalls Laus Veneris – all for the Grosvenor Gallery. For the Academy he began The Depths of the Sea. It was an extraordinary treatment of a mermaid dragging down a naked man in triumph to the bottom of the ocean, unaware that he was already dead. The epigraph he chose from Virgil, Habes tota, quod mente petisti, infelix, was ambiguous leaving it not quite clear whether the mermaid or the dead man was the wretch who ‘got what was so much desired’. Ned borrowed a model tank from the painter Henry Holiday, and began to study the effect of light under water.

  When the work was completed, but before the final glaze was put on, Leighton called round to see it. It was one of his more delicate tasks to make sure that the less conventional exhibitors were not going to send in something that wouldn’t do; it took all his urbanity to persuade Watts not to show his triptych of Fallen and Repentant Eve. It is obvious that he was taken aback, on his arrival at The Grange, by The Depths of the Sea, particularly when Ned told him he meant to put in a number of little fishes. Leighton demurred, but later wrote, ‘on the contrary, I like the idea of the fishes hugely.’ The President sounds desperate. What he was looking at was, ‘as Ned himself described it, ‘a dream, well enough’, or perhaps a nightmare.

  It went to the Academy, where it looked totally different from anything else on the walls. ‘It stood forth as the only serious thing in the Academy’, wrote Canon Dixon (who had come up to London to see his publishers) to Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘but I am out of sympathy with him.’ ‘You speak of “powerful drawing” in Burne-Jones’s picture,’ Hopkins wrote back. ‘I recognise it in that mermaid’s face and in the treatment of her fishnets and fishermanship, the tail fin turning short and flattening to save striking the ground – the stroke of truly artistic genius’ (probably only Hopkins would ever have noticed this) ‘but the drowned youth’s knees and feet are very crude and unsatisfactory in drawing, as it seems to me.’ Hopkins finally and uneasily admitted that ‘the male quality is the creative quality, which he [Burne-Jones] markedly has’.

  The real trouble about The Depths of the Sea, however, which Leighton could not have failed to notice, was the striking resemblance of the mermaid’s face to that breaker of many hearts, Laura Lyttelton. Ned did not attempt to deny this, but said ‘it was a scene in Laura’s previous existence’. This aspect of the picture passed without comment at the Academy, and Leighton must have breathed again. Burne-Jones did not appear on varnishing day, perhaps because Mary Zambaco was exhibiting a terracotta bust of Legros in the sculpture section. He was persuaded with difficulty to come to the Academy banquet.

  Far pleasanter than the banquet – where Leighton gave his usual princely address, and there were glee-singers, whom Ned hated – was the Millais retrospective at the Grosvenor earlier in the year. Millais himself appeared with his eyes full of tears, and was said to be regretting the lost genius which was brought back to him by seeing his early work, but this, since h
e hung the exhibition himself, is most unlikely. Millais wept easily. So many old friends were there, and Ned shared a cab with George du Maurier, all their disagreement disappearing like a mist in sunlight; in his enthusiasm for Millais, Ned stamped so hard that he nearly smashed the floor of the cab. He had seen the Return of the Dove, which Morris and he had admired, over thirty years ago, in the print shop in Oxford High Street. A few months later Alfred Hunt, whom they had looked at from afar in the same print shop, asked Ned to rejoin the Old Water-Colour Society. ‘I am useless at all meetings,’ Ned wrote back, ‘I am not in harmony with associations like the Academy and the Old Water-Colour Society; my real home would be in a society which embraces all art’, but, since Burton offered to rejoin as an honorary member, he agreed to accept the invitation. Almost without knowing what was happening, he felt himself being drawn into the Establishment.

  On 2 December he noted in his work book that he had completed twenty-five years with the firm. He still had the cartoons for St Philip’s, Birmingham, on hand, and he made up his mind to send nothing at all to the 1887 Academy. He had to finish his commitments for the Grosvenor and, as Margaret wrote excitedly to Watts, it was Phil’s first show-day. ‘Father is very pleased,’ she added.7 The Signor and his wife were in Athens, where the indefatigable ‘Duchess’ found them an apartment overlooking an orange grove, and suggested a thousand expeditions, which Watts was much too enfeebled to make. But he was able to send his good wishes for Phil’s début.

  All was not well, however, at the Grosvenor, which was faced with increasing difficulties. As early as 1883, Mary Gladstone noted in her diary that she had seen ‘poor deserted Lady Lindsay’ at the Rossetti exhibition, ‘a garish figure that almost destroyed sympathy’. Her marriage to Sir Coutts, against the advice of her trustees, was in disarray. In the words of her cousin, Lady Battersea,

  there were four years of brilliant happiness, followed by a shock that ended the dream. Blanche was cast in a heroic mould … relentless where wrong had been inflicted. The promises of her husband proved unreliable, so the final parting came, and Blanche started life again with her two devoted daughters.

  This left Sir Coutts in an awkward fix. The grand Scottish home was given up, but so much of his personal ambitions was sunk in the Gallery that, without Blanche’s money, he was driven to strange expedients. He thought of showing furniture as well as pictures, of giving smoking concerts, and of broadening the appeal by opening a restaurant. Burne-Jones particularly disliked restaurants in galleries. The Academy pictures, he felt, would smell of mutton chops till the end of time. Finally Sir Coutts called in Pyke, a Regent Street jeweller, as business adviser. The balance of power, Ned wrote to George Howard, was as follows:

  Pike [sic]

  Wade

  Sir Coutts Lindsay

  Hallé

  Carr

  and then the poor painters – and I don’t like it. It seems I am always resigning something or other, though I should have said I was a peaceable fellow enough.8

  Wade he describes as ‘a lesser spirit’, and ‘Carr and Hallé have been on the point of resigning for a year and a half past’. Evidently they could not agree with Sir Coutts’s desperate improvisations. When the Grosvenor closed in the summer of 1887 Ned wrote to Watts, with some relief and apparently forgetting the Academy, that he would be ‘as I have always been, a little painter painting away in a room and trying to think of nothing but my work’.9

  The decision by Carr and Hallé to open a new gallery was based – as Mrs Comyns Carr says frankly in her reminiscences – on the pictures of Burne-Jones and his ‘wealthy admirers’ who were prepared to subsidise it. The other director was Sir Coutt’s nephew, Leonard Lindsay, and Burne-Jones, reluctantly at first, agreed to serve on the committee. Comyns Carr, although he was to become Irving’s manager at the Lyceum, was not really a business man. He once, so Ned declared, sent him a telegram beginning: ‘Only 20 words allowed, must be brief.’ But he had the spirit of enterprise, and this was more than shared by his wife. At the end of the year he began looking for new premises.

  Burne-Jones had spent the summer at Rottingdean in the soothing company of ‘the blue-eyed maid’, his daughter Margaret. ‘Twin Sapphires’ was Swinburne’s name for her, and ‘sapphire is truth and I am never without it’, he wrote to Frances Horner. He had, however, given Margaret a moonstone, ‘that she might never know love, and stay with me’. In the autumn he had to go back to London, where he took charge of Margaret’s cat Frill, and wrote to her often. But the moonstone was ineffective. In February 1888 he suffered treachery. Jack Mackail, the youngish Oxford scholar who had been calling at The Grange for some years past, ‘a grave gentleman’, Ned thought him, ‘who came to talk to me about books’, suddenly broke it to him that he wanted to marry Margaret. ‘I haven’t felt very good about it,’ Ned wrote to Watts. ‘I have behaved better than I felt. She looks very happy, and before I knew he wanted her, and before I dreamt of any such thing, I though him a fine gentleman through and through, and look what he has done to me!’

  Margaret was nearly twenty-two. There was no possible objection to Jack Mackail, except that he wanted to marry her. He came of a race whose determination Ned should have recognised: he was the son of a Free Church minister. Descending on Oxford from Ayr Academy and Edinburgh with sharp weapons of scholarship, he took every conceivable honour in classics and literae humaniores. Jowett (Mackail was of course at Balliol) had prepared him carefully for high office in the university. He was tall, self-collected, polite and handsome, radical in politics, never gave himself away, did not smile much; he published three books of poetry, but only in collaboration with Balliol friends; he was so brilliant that it took courage to call him Jack (Burne-Jones substituted ‘Djacq’ in a vain attempt to turn him into a character from the Arabian nights). In 1884, when he was twenty-five and already a fellow of Balliol, Mackail suddenly accepted an appointment in the Education Department. Of course he did very well there, succeeding at the same time as a scholar, writer and biographer, but the move to London, it now appeared, had been an unexpected impulse of the heart. He wanted to be nearer to The Grange, and to see more of Margaret.

  Burne-Jones felt that his premonition of four years ago had, after all, been right. He gave his consent and prepared, as he put it, ‘to crumble into senility in an hour’ without his daughter.

  He had to concentrate on the opening of the New Gallery. A site had been found in an old fruit market at the end of Regent Street. The building itself had been a livery stable; the architect E.R. Robson, recommended by Philip Webb, undertook the conversion, but the site was not vacant until December, and everything depended on being ready by the beginning of May in order to compete directly with the spring reopening of the Grosvenor. This meant working both day and night shifts, and Joe Comyns Carr and Robson went down every evening after dinner to supervise the job. The naphtha flares round the site lit up the whole of Regent Street. Just before opening time there was a strike among the gilders in the building trade, and Joe had to call in picture framers, who ‘obliged’ out of personal regard for him, to finish the gilding in the upper gallery.

  Meanwhile Burne-Jones roused himself and persuaded Watts and ‘Tad’ to send off their best. Watts promised his Angel of Death, and Ned undertook to finish two Perseus subjects and the large version of Danae. It seemed, after all, that the building would be finished in time, and it was designed with much more feeling than the Grosvenor for what the artists wanted. In appearance it was vaguely Hispano-Moorish – the posts of the old stable had become square pillars, and there was a central court with a fountain – but the striking feature was the low ceiling and strong top lighting, which allowed the paintings to be hung at eye-level with the drawings below them.

  The opening in May 1888 started brilliantly enough. Gladstone was the first to arrive and went straight to the Danae; Lillie Langtry made a spectacular entry, Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria (only a few months before his death at Mayerling) was
there. These things were dear to the heart of Mrs Comyns Carr, who had become more worldly since her days as Mrs Jellaby Postlethwaite. But Carr had not calculated on the heat which a crowd would produce in the low rooms, and visitors looked longingly at the impluvium, ‘just the place’, as Punch pointed out, ‘for a brush and sponge’. Burne-Jones himself had trimmed his beard and attempted to find unwrinkled trousers, such as were worn by Phil, but in Punch’s cartoon (drawn by Harry Furniss, who got an excellent likeness) he appears, most surprisingly, as bald and red-nosed, with a smoking ‘clay’ in one hand and a glass of stout in the other. This was particularly pointed because Carr had not been able to get a licence from the Middlesex magistrates and there were no refreshments – always a mistake on Press Day. Furniss revenged himself further by showing Ned’s Perseus Slaying the Serpent as a workman struggling with an unfinished waterpipe, while the naked Andromache takes the opportunity of a shower.

  Burne-Jones fled to Rottingdean. But the quality of the pictures themselves was not in doubt, and the New Gallery for the rest of his life was his main, though not his only, place of exhibition. ‘The people who said it couldn’t succeed,’ he pointed out, ‘and the press who said it wouldn’t, and society who said it shouldn’t, all wrong – all wrong as usual, as they always are – the one infallible law of nature that knows no exception.’

  The launching of the New Gallery did nothing to deaden his misery at the approaching wedding. He went into the church ‘to try and feel what it would be like to hand her over for life to her husband’ but only felt ‘stupid and dazed’. Georgie’s feeling for her lovely daughter was as strong as his own, but she, as was natural, judged differently. ‘Truly it is advisable for us to marry if the right thing turns up,’ Aggie had written to Louie when the Macdonalds were still girls, and truly it still was. The right thing was love, and Margaret was in love. She bent all her quiet will-power towards an autumn wedding. Georgie had all the preparations on her hands, and in addition the distraught Ned, who went through ‘a short torment of jealousy’. After this he became first gloomily resigned, then apathetic. He agreed, with little relish, to let Phil paint him, and Phil eagerly asked Henry Cameron (Julia Cameron’s son) to come and take the preliminary photographs. At the same time Ned took the step of making his will. About his intentions there was no doubt. As he wrote to Alfred Baldwin, his businesslike brother-in-law, ‘The property is valued at £4 … Georgie is to use the £4 until she is translated and Phil and Margaret to have £2 each. Do you see? If my drawings go luckily they may bring in 3d. each and perhaps the chief estate lies there.’ The drawing-up was entrusted, of course, to George Lewis, who turned out a real ‘solicitor’s will’,10 A curious point was that his ‘illuminated books, ancient books with engravings, works upon art’ were not to go either to Georgie or to the children, but were to be converted into money and paid into the trust capital. These books would include the Hypnerotomachia, the reproductions of Botticelli’s Dante illustrations, and the many engravings brought back for him by Fairfax Murray.