Edward Burne-Jones
Page 36
Immediately after Christmas, Burne-Jones went back to London to supervise the Rossetti exhibition at the New Gallery. Lord Faringdon did not want to lend his Rossetti if it meant blank spaces on the walls, so Ned offered to paint replicas of Knights and Angels at the Chapel to put in their place. On the way to Buscot to arrange this he called on Janey Morris at Kelmscott; he had had ‘a very sad letter’ from her earlier in the year. ‘She was always used to be managed for, and is only now learning what she’s lost’, he told Rooke.14 At the exhibition itself he was worried by several forgeries, one apparently by Howell, but he felt indescribably moved at seeing the first version of ‘the finest thing Rossetti ever did, of Beatrice dead … the early watercolours are the best – the oil ones don’t count … he got to love nothing else in the world but a woman’s face.’15 Apart from this, music consoled the winter for him, he said, and not much else. He had a clavichord made for Margaret, and she played to him.
At the beginning of 1898 Burne-Jones was sixty-five, and more puzzled than ever by a world which was too arrogant to recognise that its restlessness was the result of a neglect of beauty. Why did no one bother to go and look at an exhibition of ‘old Florentine pictures’, why did they not listen to polyphonic music or the clear notes, each distinct from the other, of the harpsichord? Why did some people (including Mrs Gaskell) rush to Bayreuth to hear ‘glorious stories’ sung by squat men and Prominent Women? Mary de Morgan had told him that at her East End social club she had been asked to ‘vamp’ at the piano. What was ‘vamping’?
From this it is evident that to Burne-Jones the perception of beauty meant being able to distinguish clearly between one thing and another, just as the reality of beauty consisted of uniting the form and the spirit. As to his own work, ‘everything must go through its period of neglect; if it survives that and comes to the surface again it is pretty safe.’
Rooke entered 14 January in his diary as ‘A dark day. Pictures came back unsold from the O.W.S. Only pictures with cows in them had sold.’ The same thing had been true in 1864, though the cows were no longer by Birket Foster.16 Burne-Jones’s friends became even more anxious than usual that he should try the effects of a long visit to Italy. Spencer Stanhope, who had been over in the summer, wrote once again to recommend Florence, even though there were electric trams in the streets now, and lady bicyclists. Frances Balfour thought his life might have been prolonged if only he could have agreed to Italian winters.
‘Spring 1898. Illness, absence, anxieties’, Rooke wrote. The absence was the Mistress’s, for though Burne-Jones could not be induced to escape the fog, Georgie had agreed, for reasons of health, to go to Bordighera with the Alma Tademas and Phil. Phil was going on to Monte Carlo, where he thought he might see Lillie Langtry. Ned ‘rejoiced have having sent me to a sunny land’, Georgie wrote in the Memorials, ‘though nothing would have tempted him to come among its villas and hotels.’ He pictured Bordighera as ‘a kind of celestial Malvern’. There was a great upset at her departure on 28 January, and then ‘the quiet of it! There’s been nobody here since Thursday!’ While she was away Ned wrote to her every day, and said as little as he could about an attack, his fourth, of influenza, followed by another period of ‘beef tea and nightmares’. In one dream he found himself throwing paint over Charles Hallé. All this beef tea was probably not helpful; W.A.S. Benson called and cheered him with some bottles of claret.
Rooke thought it best to take him down to Rottingdean. Although ‘Ruddy (beloved of my heart) is in South Africa … he would go – and he will always be going away – any place where mankind is flighty’,17 still there was the trusted sea air, and work to be done on the Prioress’s Tale, which had found a purchaser. ‘Sat. 6 March 98. I did not find him at Victoria and came down in separate carriage to Rottingdean catching sight of him on the platform preparing to get into a fly, grey-complexioned and worried-looking.’ Rooke was relieved when the Mistress returned in March. Burne-Jones walked part of the way along the Brighton road to meet her. Georgie thought he looked worn, but not, after all, much thinner.
Mrs Gaskell was also in Italy that spring. From her travels the year before she had brought Ned engravings from Orvieto which had moved him so much that he avoided looking at them when he was tired; this year she promised to bring more. In the meantime, worried by his concerns over Avalon, she suggested changing the rocks in the foreground to flowers. The alteration by no means improved the picture. Spring flowers meant a change of season, so the apples had to be painted out and with them went the last trace of the wild orchard of Avalon. However, Ned wanted to try it. Rooke would take him to Kew Gardens. ‘I must have something besides irises – NOT lilies … one poppy I have put for sleep – I think it shall stand alone.’18 Lilies of the valley were only associated with Mrs Gaskell herself. Before leaving in February she had sent a bunch of them to the studio. ‘I’ve aimed continually at debasing her mind,’ Burne-Jones told Rooke wistfully. ‘I can’t reach her pride, I can’t reach her revenge … a great blow it is to see all my most valuable teachings thrown away on her.’
He was still forcing himself to go down to Merton Abbey for the last stages of the work on the Nativity window – cementing the glass and soldering on the lead ties to attach the lights to the bars. Apparently he also went to Hawarden to see the window set up, and found that after all it did not meet his specifications. The late churchwarden, Mr Bell-Jones, could remember Burne-Jones’s visit, and he remembered him as a very angry man; he saw him in his mind’s eye standing in the churchyard surrounded with fragments of smashed purple glass. The latent violence in the artist’s gentle nature, like his strong will, would not have surprised Rooke who had been ‘terribly put out’ a few months earlier when he had lent the Master a book. It was The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, which Rooke probably felt was safe and indeed dull enough. But he must have overlooked Chapter VIII, where the Autocrat explains why artists are ‘prone to the abuse of stimulants’ and tells us that ‘the dreaming faculties are always the dangerous ones, because their mode of action can be imitated by artificial excitement.’ This was an insult to the dream and the imagination itself, and Burne-Jones put a red-hot poker right through the book.
The 13th April 1898 was the first day at work at the St Paul’s studio. Avalon hung there alone on the bare wall. One or two friends called, but to Rooke the place looked vast and empty. He had brought sandwiches for their lunch. When Georgie went down again to Rottingdean, Ned dated his letters to her from ‘Avalon’. ‘I shall let most things pass me by,’ he wrote, ‘I must, if ever I want to reach Avalon.’
But he could not let them pass. On the way to dinner with the Gaskells on 21 April he saw on the posters the first news of the Spanish-American civil war. His stomach sank at ‘a world of needless misery and bloodshed of all kinds that is about to begin’. And he believed Britain could not avoid war in South Africa. ‘The Empire countries will have us one by one.’ To this wide distress was added a personal one. Mrs Gaskell, peaceable and gracious as she was, was a soldier’s wife, and her daughter Amy was soon to marry a soldier. Her public work lay ahead of her (she organised the first library service for troops in hospital during the second Boer War), but he could see already that her loyalties must lie further and further apart from his. Perhaps it was just as well. Perhaps the time for such intense friendships was over for a man who, as he said himself, was so old that he had seen oak forests rise and fall. But ‘love and hatred, devotion and fury are the things that move people – by which men and women are revealed to one another. Without them all is so dead-alive …’19
He still hoped that the Kelmscott Press, or possibly Longman’s, might bring out the Cupid and Psyche, although Sydney Cockerell, with considerable experience of Burne-Jones’s power of delay, must have had his doubts. Meanwhile Mrs Pat Campbell had asked him to design her costume for a new production, Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Melisande. She came to read him the play. The yearning of the characters towards an elusive happiness is a pale s
hadow of the Quest, just as Maeterlinck’s colour specifications – water’s smile, rose-awakening, amber dew – are an even paler shadow of Morris and Liberty. But Burne-Jones recognised the affinity, and the translation was by Jack Mackail, with Forbes-Robertson – who else? – as Goland. He grew interested, made suggestions for the sets, and designed for Mrs Pat a wonderful dress ‘like a gold umbrella case’. The opening was to be at the Prince of Wales on 21 June.
Burne-Jones’s last portrait drawing was of Mrs Gaskell in a muslin dress.20 This pencil study shows that, as might have been expected, her face had been the inspiration of many of the Chaucer illustrations. He made her a present of the drawing.
Three days a week had to be given to the Avalon, the area to be painted next day being carefully marked out with chalk. Something was still not right about it. Burne-Jones began another gouache of three of the figures. On 13 May, Rooke came in at 9.15 a.m. to find ‘the Master sitting low down, quiet and motionless as he can make himself, painting irises at the bottom of Avalon’.21
What killed Burne-Jones? The grey complexion and the tiredness – he often fell asleep now on an outing or in front of the Avalon – were evidently indications of a serious heart condition, and any shock, even a bad dream, might bring on his first attack of angina pectoris. But in May he was still dining out and seeing callers every day at The Grange. On 19 May, Gladstone’s death was announced; on the 28th he went to the Abbey for the funeral. On 9 June, Dante’s day, he could not make out the hands on the school clock across the road, although it was twelve o’clock on a bright summer’s morning. On the other hand, on the 14th Sir George Lewis, certainly not an unobservant man, thought ‘he had never seen Ned looking better’ as they talked together after dinner. The following day a letter came from Mary Drew to say that the window had been put up at last in Hawarden church.22
On the 16th Ned came back from another day’s work on Avalon and found tea-time visitors. One of them was an artistic niece of Spencer Stanhope’s, who may well have been commissioned to have a last try at getting Burne-Jones to Florence. Certainly she told him that she herself could only work at the Villa Nuti. Freda Stanhope was only one more of the many young Kensington ladies who, Burne-Jones had told Rooke, should be kept somewhere where they could not get at painters, but painters could get at them; but he was touched when he found that she was copying a little Carpaccio in Florence because she wanted to study the reds, just as, thirty-five years before, he had studied the Dream of St Ursula. His courtesy became real interest, he lit a candle and took her to see all that he was doing in the upstairs studio.
When the visitors had left Ned wrote a letter to Rudyard Kipling, who was back in England, telling him he wanted to come down to Rottingdean and see him. Then he and Georgie settled down to a familiar quiet evening, Georgie reading aloud by lamplight. They went up to their rooms, but in the middle of the night Burne-Jones woke with acute pain in the heart. He called out to Georgie, who hurried in to him, but not long after she got to him, he died.
The memorial service on 23 June 1898 was the first ever held in Westminster Abbey in honour of a painter, as the result of an individually signed petition sponsored by the Prince of Wales. So many people came and so notable were they that The Times reporter lost grip, and had to apologise for leaving out distinguished names. But by this time the ashes of Burne-Jones had been quiety buried in the outside wall of the south transept of Rottingdean church.
The funeral there, on 20 June 1898, was as unpretentious as possible. Nobody wore black; indeed Margaret came in a white dress. Rooke made a last entry in his diary. ‘Someone sent lilies of the valley.’ Georgie also brought flowers to be carried to the grave – a small wreath of hearts ease.
Picture Section
St Cecilia’s Window, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford (1872)
One of Burne-Jones’s finest designs for ‘the Firm’ which Morris reorganised in 1874. By kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Christ Church Cathedral
Left to right: Mr Jones (Burne-Jones’s father), Margaret, Burne-Jones, Philip, Georgiana Burne-Jones, May Morris, William Morris, Jane Morris, Jennie Morris in the garden of The Grange
Edward Poynter: Georgiana Burne-Jones
Edward Burne-Jones and his son Phil
Kate Vaughan, Burne-Jones’s favourite dancer
Margaret Burne-Jones in 1880
Georgiana Burne-Jones, with Phil and Margaret in the background, begun 1883
Burne-Jones in middle age (‘shabby’) and (‘dressed foppishly’), 1883
Illustration for The Romaunt of the Rose, 1874–5
Illustration for the Aeneid, 1874–5
Edward Burne-Jones drawing for Angela Mackail, his grand-daughter (c. 1892)
Mrs Pat Campbell in 1896
May Morris
William Morris towards the end of his life
APPENDIX 1: SOURCES
1 Unpublished Material
PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Mr Francis Cassavetti Letters to Mrs Cassavetti
Miss Mary Chamot Burne-Jones’s Italian notebook, Sept-Oct 1871
Lord Hardinge of Penshurst: Letters to Olive Maxse
The Dowager Lady Hardinge of Penshurst: Letters to Violet Maxse
Mr George Howard: Letters to George and Rosalind Howard
Mrs Celia Rooke: Diary of T.E. Rooke
Mr Lance Thirkell: Burne-Jones and Macdonald papers
Lady Tweedsmuir: Letters to Norman Grosvenor and Mary Stuart Wortley
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
British Museum: Letters to Arthur Balfour, Add MSS 49838
the Dalziels, Add MSS 39168 ff. 59, 61
Mary Drew, Add MSS 46246
Mrs Gaskell, Add MSS 34217–8 LL 1935
Cockerell Papers, Add MSS 52078 vol. LXXXVI & CL
Morris: Shorter Poems, some unpublished, copied by Mrs Jane Morris, Add MSS 45298B
Morris: the unpublished novel, Add MSS 45328
D.G. Rossetti: letters to Jane Morris, Add MSS 52333A
Georgiana Burne-Jones: letters to May Morris, Add MSS 45347
Dr D.T. Zambaco: letters to Mme. Onou, Add MSS Eg3234
UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL
Bodleian Library: Letters to F.G. Stephens
Brotherton Collection, Letters to Swinburne, Watts-Dunton, and D.G. Rossetti
Colbeck Collection, University of British Columbia: Letters to D.G. Rossetti, with some annotations by W.M. Rossetti
Fitzwilliam Museum Library: Materials for the Memorials, deposited by Lady Burne-Jones
Burne-Jones’s account book with Morris & Co., 1861–97
Burne-Jones’s working list (incomplete) of paintings, from 1862
Miriam Lutcher Stark Library, University of Texas: Letters from D.G. Rossetti to C.A. Howell
Watts Museum and Gallery, Compton, Surrey: Letters to G.F. Watts
William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow: Notebooks of J.W. Mackail
Letters to Charles and Lucy Faulkner from William Morris and Mrs Jane Morris
Victoria and Albert Museum: Letters from Warington Taylor to Philip Webb, William Morris and D.G. Rossetti, 1866–9, Reserve Case JJ35
2 Select Bibliography
ALEXANDRE, Arsène Sir Edward Burne-Jones (2nd series), Newnes’ Art Library, 1907
ALLINGHAM, William William Allingham: A Diary, ed. H. Allingham and E.B. Williams, Longman, 1911
ALMA-TADEMA Sir Alma Tadema’s World-Famous Home, Sale Catalogue, Hampton & Sons, 1919
ANGELI, Helen Rossetti Pre-Raphaelite Twilight: the Story of Charles Augustus Howell, Richards Press, 1954
ASQUITH The Autobiography of Margot Asquith, introduced by Mark Bonham Carter, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962
BALDRY, A.L. Burne-Jones: illustrated with 8 reproductions in colour, T.B. & E.C. Jack, 1909
BALDWIN, A.W. The Macdonald Sisters, Peter Davies, 1960
BALFOUR, ArthurChapters of Autobiography, Cassell, 1930
BALFOUR, Lady FrancesNe Obliviscaris: Dinna Forget, Hodder &
Stoughton, 1930
BARRINGTON, Mrs G.L.The Life, Letters, and Work of Frederic Leighton, George Allen, 1906
BATTERSEA, Constance Lady BELL, Malcolm Reminiscences, Macmillan, 1922
—— Edward Burne-Jones: A Record and Review, Bell, 1892
BERLIN PHOTOGRAPHIC COMPANY The Works of Edward Burne-Jones. Ninety-One Photogravures reproduced from the original paintings, 1901
BLYTH, Henry Smuggler’s Village: the Story of Rottingdean, Privately printed, no date
BIRKENHEAD, Sheila Illustrious Friends, Hamish Hamilton, 1965
BROOKE, Stopford Life and Letters, ed. L.P. Jack, John Murray, 1917
BUFFENOIRE, Hyppolite Les Salons de Paris: Grandes Dames Contemporaines: La Baronne Deslandes, Paris, 1895
BURNE-JONES, Georgiana (G. B-J.) Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Macmillan, 1904
—— Address to the Electors of Rottingdean, Privately printed, 1894
—— What We Have Done, Privately printed, 1896
BURNE-JONES, Sir Philip Notes on some unfinished works of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart., Magazine of Art, vol. XXIII (1900)
CAMPBELL, Mrs Patrick My Life and Some Letters, Hutchinson, 1925
CARR, Mrs Alice Comyns Reminiscences, ed. Eve Adam, Hutchinson, 1925
CARR, J. Comyns Some Eminent Victorians, Duckworth, 1908
—— Coasting Bohemia, Macmillan, 1914