I can’t say how it was that Howell eventually overstepped the mark, but he made some total miscalculation, so that after 1870 neither Ruskin, nor the Ionides family, nor the Burne-Joneses ever saw him again. Mary Zambaco went off to Paris, though not for good, in 1872. This was a time of crisis, when Georgie went away with the children sometimes to stay with her family, and once to Whitby to seek advice from George Eliot. Burne-Jones would be left moping at The Grange, living, like all Victorian husbands left to themselves, on bread and mutton chops, very lonely, and sometimes doing unexpected things. On one occasion he gave notice to the cook, because—although larger than himself and twelve times larger than Georgie—she was so ugly. The Grange, which was to have been a retreat, begins to sound like a place of desolation.
And yet it’s the early 1870s that Rudyard Kipling, Georgie’s nephew, is describing in Something of Myself. His parents went back to India, leaving him with childminders in Southsea, where he was miserable, but the Christmas holidays he spent at The Grange. Here he had love and affection, he says, ‘as much as the greediest could desire’—and he was not very greedy—the smell of paint and turpentine, and in the rooms ‘chairs and cupboards such as the world had not yet seen, for our Deputy Uncle Topsy was just beginning to fabricate these things.’ And once when little Ruddie and Margaret were eating bread and dripping in the nursery Morris came in and sat on the rocking-horse and ‘slowly surging back and forth while the poor beast creaked; he told us a tale full of fascinating horrors, about a man who was condemned to dream bad dreams…He went away as abruptly as he had come. Long afterwards, when I was old enough to know a maker’s pains, it dawned on me that we must have heard the Saga of Burnt Njal.’
This doesn’t sound at all like what Burne-Jones himself called them—‘the desolate years.’ He had quite rightly resigned from the Old Watercolour Society because they had wanted him to alter his Phyllis and Demophoön, one of the most beautiful likenesses of all of Mary Zambaco. As a result he had nowhere to exhibit his work. He lay low, sometimes when he was alone not even answering the door. But he did have the incomparable support of Morris, who had moved his family to Chiswick and began, in 1872, to come to breakfast on Sunday mornings. (This is always referred to as ‘an easy walk,’ but it is not so very easy.) The breakfasts were partly a delightful interlude, where the two of them sat reading the comic Ally Sloper, partly a working conference. Burne-Jones depended for an income at this time on glass designing, and was nearly always in debt to the Firm.
In 1871 a new picture—a very small but beautiful rose pink and brown picture—appeared at The Grange, where it was hung in the dining room. (It was later in the drawing room at the house of Lance Thirkell, Burne-Jones’s great-grandson, rather awkwardly hung behind the piano.) It had been given to Ned by the American scholar, Professor Norton, and when it had been cleaned it turned out to be Europa and the Bull, perhaps by Giorgione. As Graham Robertson said, ‘Giorgione was a painter and must have painted something, so why not this Europa?’ It seems to have provided the impulse to make Burne-Jones start off on a rather crazy three-week tour of Northern Italy, leaving the studio in charge of his assistant, Thomas Rooke, while Georgie and the children went to stay with her sister, Louisa Baldwin. He came back penniless and dazed, having seen Pieros, Mantegnas, Botticellis, Michelangelos, and started work on some of his loveliest things, The Hesperides, The Mill, The Beguiling of Merlin. He was still not exhibiting, but his friends increasingly thought that he should. The determining factor, predictably, was another young woman. This was Frances Graham, the younger daughter of the Liberal M.P. and generous patron of the arts William Graham. She saw Burne-Jones as a dreamer like herself. ‘Mrs Burne-Jones was otherwise,’ she wrote. ‘She was rather daunting.’
Her gentle pressure on Burne-Jones to exhibit coincided with the opening of the Grosvenor Galleries in April 1877, where he did show, with enormous success. His Golden Stairs was the Grosvenor’s great sensation of 1880. The Grange, therefore, opened up in the 1880s, by which time, as Georgie complained, the respectable old name of Fulham had been taken away and replaced by West Kensington. There had been a good deal more building, including an hotel, The Cedars, which seems to have been a kind of landmark for people who got lost on the way to The Grange. But the place was easier by now to get to—a bus came from Kensington to the top of North End Lane, and The Grange was now only a few minutes from the District Railway’s West Kensington station. Meanwhile, W. A. S. Benson had been called in to design a new studio in the garden. Here the huge canvases could be passed in and out through slits in the walls, there were hot-water pipes, and a skylight so that it could be used for painting with scaffolding. The garden continued to be lovely, with white lilies, stock, lavender, acacias and a great mulberry tree. Inside, Graham Robertson says in Time Was, the house seemed to be holding its breath. ‘The hall was dark and the little dining-room opening out of it even more shadowy with its deep-green leaf-patterned walls; and it is strange to remember that the Brotherhood of Artists who loved beauty did not love light, but lived in a tinted gloom through which clear spots of colour shone jewel-like. At the end of the dining-room stood a dark green cabinet [now in the V&A]. Above it hung a small painting, a little figure in magical red [the Giorgione].’
This was Graham Robertson’s first visit, so that he didn’t notice the doing-up The Grange had had since Burne-Jones’s success at the Grosvenor—the Firm had redecorated, providing Bird & Vine bed-hangings and yellow velvet chair-covers. Everything was modest compared with the homes of the princely artists of the 1880s, and there was only one sofa that, under its Morris chintz, actually had springs. However, Burne-Jones was now expected to keep open house on Sunday afternoons. Georgie disliked presiding over so many people, but Margaret, who was now growing up, ‘dispensed’ as Burne-Jones put it ‘lower middle-class hospitality with finish and charm.’ There was plenty for the visitors to see, as there had been a considerable expansion of work in the studio—silversmithing, gesso work, designs for pianos, needlework and jewellery as well as studies for the great canvases of the 1880s.
Everything, of course, had to be cleaned. To Georgie the domestic-help situation was ‘either a bloody feud or a hellish compact.’ One of her staff, familiar from Burne-Jones’s comic drawings, was Mrs Wilkinson, said to carry so much equipment—brooms, buckets, and soap—that she had to come into the studio sideways. After Burne-Jones had resigned from the Academy—he joined as an Associate in 1885 but realized at once that he had made a mistake—he said that he felt ‘cleaner than even Mrs Wilkinson could make me.’
As well as the Sunday visitors, and often at the same time, friends arrived, from the very earliest to the much later ones—Sarah Bernhardt, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James. But there was, of course, a deeply dissonant note in these prosperous years, the imperfect sympathy with Morris. In the January of 1883 he joined the Democratic Federation, and as Burne-Jones put it, ‘we are silent now about many things, and we used to be silent about none.’ He came much less often to The Grange, and if he did come, had to leave early to ‘preach.’ Burne-Jones felt that Morris was surrounding himself with the unworthy, but he also felt that he himself had failed his friend. Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell.
After Margaret married Jack Mackail in 1888—Burne-Jones was fifty-five that year but after the wedding said he felt ninety-seven—The Grange was no longer open to visitors on Sundays. They did sometimes appear—Aubrey Beardsley, for example, with his portfolio and his sister Mabel, or Julia Cartwright, the art historian. ‘I got into a bus which stopped short of North End Road and lost my way into the bargain,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘but when I got to The Grange, all my troubles were forgotten. Philip opened the door, Lady Burne-Jones rushed to welcome me and took my coat to dry and Sir Edward came running down the stairs saying…what could he do for me!…Later, just as I was going he said I must let him give me one of his little finished drawings and he would send it after me in a case.’ Such
was the courtesy of The Grange.
Although Burne-Jones frequently gave out that he would finish up in the Fulham workhouse, if they would allow him to go on painting there, the question of their leaving The Grange was raised only once. A new lease—the old one was due to run out in 1902—was rapidly arranged by that prince of solicitors, George Lewis, who was a great friend and admirer. If the family wanted fresh air, they had by now a small, whitewashed house at Rottingdean, although Burne-Jones sometimes couldn’t face the icy cold there. This came second only to Kelmscott Manor, where the water jugs in the bedrooms were frozen solid by morning.
For the 1890s there are detailed accounts of life at The Grange, in particular Rooke’s studio diary, which was certainly edited by ‘the Mistress’ (as Rooke calls Georgie), and perhaps started at her request. We’re told these notes were made while Rooke and ‘the Master’ were working at different levels of the huge canvases (although if there was one thing Burne-Jones disliked above all it was having his conversations taken down). Then there is Three Houses, by Angela Thirkell, who had been the little Angela Mackail, born in May 1890. In Three Houses The Grange appears as a children’s paradise even more paradisal than it had been to Rudyard Kipling in the 1870s, partly because while Kipling was understood and most kindly treated, Angela was grossly spoiled. When she was born Burne-Jones entered on yet another term of hopeless slavery. He was in a state of open rivalry with Gladstone as to which of them could spoil their granddaughters the most. Angela always sat next to him at lunch, blew the froth off his beer, had her bread buttered on both sides, rushed into the kitchen to talk to Robert the parrot. The children were free to roam the whole house, except the studio, and yet she saw William Morris only once, in Georgie’s sitting room. She saw him as ‘an old man (or so I thought him) with the aggressive mop of white hair who was talking, between fits of coughing, to my grandmother.’ And yet Morris was often in the house. Having become a printer, he assumed that Burne-Jones would be the chief illustrator for the Kelmscott Press. The Sunday morning breakfasts returned and seem to have been times of heroic and unwise eating on Morris’s part—sausages, haddock, tongue, and plover’s eggs, according to Rooke, ‘and then he would go to the side-table and wish he had had something else.’ And then, in the February of 1896, Morris suddenl y leaned his forehead on his hand in a way that Ned and Georgie had never seen before—never, in all the time they had known him.
If we take into account Morris’s illness and the fact (which Burne-Jones faced perfectly honestly) that during the 1890s his large pictures were beginning not to sell, and that the height of his great reputation was past, we might see The Grange during these last years as reverting to what Georgie had wanted in the first place, a dignified retreat. A place, too, Burne-Jones felt, since Margaret left, ‘of echoes and silence,’ but still it had become, or should have become, a spiritual stronghold where he could paint undistracted, as he had always wanted to, in a world ‘more true than real.’ However, not long after he had started work on the Chaucer illustrations he fell in love again, this time with Mrs Helen Gaskell, a delicate-looking creature, twenty-five years younger than himself, one of the Souls. He got behind with the drawings—‘you know why,’ he wrote to Mrs Gaskell—‘I must lock myself into a room, but I can’t lock my soul up—but Morris never fails, nothing disturbs the tranquil stream of his life…he looked so disappointed that I had done nothing since last year—and I couldn’t tell him why.’ Often he wrote to Mrs Gaskell, who seems to have been a sensitive and tactful woman, by every post (and there were five deliveries in those days). ‘Such strength as his [Morris’s] I see nowhere—I suppose he minds for me more than anyone, yet the day I go he will lose nothing, only he will have to think to himself, instead of thinking aloud.’ And then in the evening at The Grange he would sit down with Georgie for a game of draughts, or they often had some music. Georgie had a grand piano by now, and Margaret’s clavichord was still in the drawing room.
Burne-Jones survived Morris’s death by only two years. At the end of a visit in May 1898 Julia Cartwright wished him good health (he was only too liable to catch influenza). He only replied ‘I hope, I hope, I hope.’ During the night of the 16th of June, he died in his bedroom at The Grange.
The Grange is now ‘a house of air.’ But when Georgie went to live permanently in Rottingdean, it must in any case have lost its character. Kipling certainly thought so when he wrote about ‘the open-work iron bell-pull on the wonderful gate that let me into all felicity. When I had a house of my own, and The Grange was emptied of meaning, I begged for and was given the bell-pull for my entrance, in the hope that other children might also feel happy when they rang it.’ It is all that is left, but it means that anyone who goes to Batemans can feel they have at least been in touch with The Grange.
‘Life at the Grange’, the Journal of the William Morris
Society, Vol. 13, No 1, 1998
Within a Magic Circle
A review of an exhibition of watercolours and drawings by Edward Burne-Jones, Tate Gallery, 1993
Burne-Jones, an amiable depressive who felt fifty years older on every birthday, believed (or said he did) that Sir Henry Tate hated him and that his work would not be represented in the fine new gallery, opened in 1897. Here, however, is a special exhibition of over seventy of his watercolours and drawings, drawn from the gallery’s collection, which complements the great oil paintings, and covers nearly his entire working life. These are supplemented by loans from a private collection and from the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery.
Pliable in the hands of children and pretty women, Burne-Jones was admirably determined about his art. He started by painting in watercolours because Rossetti did and because (according to his chief studio assistant, Thomas Rooke) he could not stomach the greasiness of oils. It is quite true that Burne-Jones felt the fascination of loathing for stout ladies (whom he called Prominent Women) and even for the sight of the fat on the Sunday joint at The Grange. He did, however, begin to paint in oils in the mid-1860s. But he continued to experiment with the watercolour medium and the increasingly elegant effects which could be obtained with it right until the end of his life.
At a much earlier stage, these experiments brought Burne-Jones into disfavour with the Old Watercolour Society, to which, with Ruskin’s help, he was elected in 1864. Two of the members, he told Rooke, refused on his reception day to shake him by the hand. Their objections were partly technical for although the use of body colour and scraping had always been permitted by the Society, many felt this couldn’t be extended to young Jones’s rich saturated paint, mixed with gum, while on Touching-up Day he was the only artist in the rooms who varnished his canvases. (It was, in fact, difficult to tell whether they were watercolours or not. ‘Love Among the Ruins’ was terribly damaged, to Whistler’s amusement, when the photographers covered the highlights with egg-white, thinking it was an oil, and the 1872—6 ‘Wheel of Fortune’ has its own label on the back: ‘This Picture, being painted in Water Colour, would be injured by the slightest moisture.’)
In all accounts of their dispute with Burne-Jones, the Old Watercolour Society come out as the small-minded villains of the piece, and yet they had a case to answer. Watercolours should, perhaps, be painted with water. Their opposition to his subject-matter went much deeper, and was a confirmation of the Establishment’s old battles with the Pre-Raphaelites twenty years earlier.
In the present exhibition are some of the most attractive of the small early watercolours, the ‘Sidonia von Bork’ and ‘Clara von Bork’ of 1860 and ‘Fair Rosamund and Queen Eleanor’, a delightful small version of this favourite subject showing tiles on the walls which might have been made by the new firm of Morris and his friends. Rossetti’s ‘Lucrezia Borgia’, shown for comparison with the ‘Sidonia von Bork’, makes his overwhelming influence clear.
None of these raised much objection at the Old Watercolour Society, but Birmingham have lent the picture which dismayed them when Burne-Jones entere
d it in 1864, and which his wife Georgiana thought of as a turning-point in his career, ‘The Merciful Knight’. It represents a miracle in the life of St John Gualberto. The saint, having forgiven the murderers of his kinsman, is praying at a wayside shrine when the wooden image of Christ leans down and embraces him. The source of light is uncertain, but above the forest trees there is a glimpse of one of Burne-Jones’s striking ‘white skies’, and the picture is either an intensely powerful image, or morbid, stiff, badly drawn, Popish and unworthy of the Society. It is shown here with two composition studies, a landscape study and a nude study for the knight which show that he was originally to be standing, not kneeling, with an altar between himself and the crucifix.
Burne-Jones survived the hostility to his ‘Merciful Knight’, but resigned from the Old Watercolour Society in 1870 over the outcry against his ‘Phyllis and Demophoön’. He was requested, but refused, to paint in some drapery over Demophoön’s genitals, preferring to withdraw his picture. The subject-matter, once again, offended, since it showed a woman, sprung from the almond tree growing on her suicide’s grave, imploring a man for his love. The head of Phyllis ‘clearly portrayed’, says Ian Warrell in his introduction to the catalogue, ‘his mistress Maria Zambaco’. She was not Maria, but Mary, and whether she was Burne-Jones’s mistress or not no one can tell until her long awaited biography appears, but certainly the crisis in his marriage drove him to a painful retreat for nearly seven years.
During this time, however, he still had faithful private patrons, undertook two journeys to Italy, and worked on certain great recurrent, indeed obsessive themes—Cupid and Psyche, the Troy Triptych, the Perseus cycle, Briar Rose. Particularly interesting here are the three drawings in gouache and gold paint on brown paper for the Perseus series. The ten panels of the story—the destruction of Medea and the rescue of Andromache—had been commissioned in 1875 by Arthur Balfour for his music-room at 4 Carlton Gardens. In waiting for his pictures (he never got them and indeed the oils were never completed), he showed his habitual patience and calm. But then Balfour, as soon as he met Burne-Jones, ‘became an instant victim of his mind and art’. Nearly twenty years later, with his music-room still undecorated, he was ready to come at a moment’s notice (although Parliament was sitting) to advise the painter in yet another emotional crisis.
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