Art Journal - Burne Jones

ART JOURNAL 1893.

This fascinating article appeared in the Art Journal of 1893. It is a review of the catalogue for an Exhibition of the work of Edward Burne-Jones in the winter of 1893 at the New Gallery. This review contains much interesting information about the painter, his unorthodox working methods, and his early life, virtually all this information coming directly from the great man. I hope visitors enjoy this article about the greatest English artist of the second half of the nineteenth century. I have been unable to find any information about the author Julia Cartwright.

EDWARD BURNE-JONES: A RECORD AND A REVIEW.

By Julia Cartwright

The art of Mr Burne-Jones has lately claimed a large share of public attention. Last autumn many of his finest works were called to mind by the exhibition of Mr Frederick Hollyer’s admirable photographs, and this winter a full and representative collection of his paintings and drawings have been brought together at the New Gallery. In spite of the severity of the season, in spite of frost and fog, crowds of visitors have flocked to the exhibition, and art critics and journalists have been alike busy with his name. Many and varied are the opinions which have been expressed, and the judgements pronounced on his work. All the old complaints have been repeated. His art has been condemned as “literary.” We have been told again that his faces are all of one type, that his subjects are out of date, and his style antiquated. Even the charge that he cannot draw has been brought up again. But in spite of the wholesale condemnation of certain critics, and the half-hearted praise of others, the verdict has been, on the whole favourable, and this master’s claim to a foremost place among living painters has been fully recognised.

Under these circumstances the appearance of Mr Malcolm Bell’s monograph was certainly well-timed. Both as a tribute to the great artist’s genius, and as a permanent catalogue of his works, this splendid volume has received a cordial welcome. No pains have been spared to make the book worthy of its subject. Both in the quality of the paper and printing, and in the beauty of the illustrations with which its pages are so profusely adorned, this English work almost deserves to rank with the sumptuous publications which issue yearly from the French presses. The choice for illustrations has been remarkably happy, and their reproduction uniformly excellent, whether taken from Mr Holliyer’s platinotypes, or directly from the original, as in the case of the photogravure of Lord Wharncliffe’s picture of “King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid,” which adorns the frontispiece.

In one or two cases, such as the photogravure of “Love among the Ruins,” the tone is rather black, a fault which it is very difficult to avoid. The reproduction of the studies of heads, on the other hand, is eminently successful. Nothing, for instance, could be better rendered than the portrait of Paderewski. The same can be said of the drawings and cartoons for the stained glass or tapestry which form so important a feature of this master’s work, and were so fully represented at the recent exhibition. Whole sheets of studies of armour and drapery, of children and roses, bear witness to the minute faithfulness and unwearied pains which the artist bestows on every detail of his pictures. Each successive period of his career is here represented, from those charming little watercolour drawings of early years, which attracted so much attention in the West room of the New Gallery, to the latest cartoon now in the act of being executed by Messrs Morris & Co. As we turn over these pages, perhaps what strikes us most is the constancy with which the painter has clung to his old ideals. Saving in the great technical advance which is, of course, evident in his later works, the master of sixty is to all intents and purposes the same as the youth of five and twenty. The same romantic feeling, the same passionate sense of artistic beauty, which live in the little picture Sir Galahad, painted in 1858, inspired the delicately wrought design of the maiden knight, kneeling at the door of the chapel in the wood before the blessed vision of the Grail, which has just left his studio.

In point of artistic beauty, the book, we repeat, leaves nothing to be desired. We wish it were possible to speak as highly as the literary part of the work. Unfortunately, we cannot admire Mr. Bell’s style. Such phrases as “the artistic hive in England was hotching with high anticipations,” or “the fashioners of crass inanities” were “free to flaunt their bedizenments before the general eye,” might also have been omitted. And we also see with regret that he has thought it well to revive forgotten controversies, and devote so much of his space to the consideration of Mr Burne-Jones’s former critics. He has a perfect right to meet and refute unfair charges which have been brought against the artist’s style, but these long quotations from old magazines and newspapers are decidedly out of place in a volume of this kind. Mr Burne-Jones himself has never stopped to answer a single hostile critic, and has never allowed their utterances to disturb his equanimity or arrest the production of his work. His biographer would have done wisely to follow his example. At the same time we appreciate the genuine enthusiasm and love which Mr. Bell brings to his task, and the good use which he has made of his opportunities as a kinsman of the painter.

Most readers will turn at once to the biographical chapter in which we are told how Mr. Burne-Jones was born in Birmingham in 1833, of a Welsh family, and educated at King Edward’s School, where Bishop Lightfoot and the present Archbishop of Canterbury were the among the senior students. Here he won an exhibition which took him to Exeter college on the same day as Mr. William Morris, with whom he soon became intimate. We know the great results which have sprung from this friendship, and it is pleasant to think that a memorial of this first meeting exists in the beautiful tapestry of the “adoration of the Magi,” now in the chapel of Exeter College. The sight of a woodcut in a volume of William Allingham’s poems, and afterwards of a drawing of Dante by Rossetti, first inspired young Burne-Jones with a deep admiration for the poet-painter, and a passionate longing to devote himself to art. Fired by this resolve he went to London in 1855, and there, at the Working Men’s College in Great Titchfield Street, he first met his hero. By Rossetti’s advice he gave up all idea of returning to Oxford, and set to work under his master’s guidance to become a painter himself. All the part of the book that relates to the young artist’s intercourse with Rossetti has been evidently taken down from Mr. Burne-Jones’s own lips, and is naturally of deepest interest. Scarcely less valuable is the careful and circumstantial record of his artistic work during the next thirty-five years Mr Bell has given us in the following chapter. Mr Burne-Jones’s methods of work are as original as his genius. “He likes to linger lovingly over a picture working at it only when in the mood and laying it aside for others at frequent intervals, for he always keeps a number in a state of slow, careful advance.” Thus many of his pictures remain for years in his studio and are often put aside for months at a time. The “Chant d’Amour” was nine years in the course of execution, the “Bath of Venus” fifteen. The famous “Briar Rose” series was inscribed with the date 1870-1890, and the great picture of “Arthur in Avalon,” which still hangs in the artist’s studio was designed in 1881. “The Mirror of Venus” ( of which we give a reproduction in The Art Journal for 1892, page 133) was begun in 1873 and finished in time for the first exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. It belonged-as our readers will remember-to Mr Leyland, and was lately sold for three thousand five hundred and seventy guineas. The figure of Temperance, a fair-faced woman pouring water from a jar on the flames which have no power to hurt her, was begun in 1872, as a companion to the better-known pictures of “Faith” and “Hope,” and finished by the end of 1873.

The first design of “The Annunciation” was begun in 1872, and the picture itself, now the property of Lord Carlisle, was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879. We give our readers a reproduction of this noble work, which has already been described in our January number. It is one of the few religious paintings of modern times which can nbe placed side by side with the paintings of the old Italian masters. It belongs to the same order, and springs from the same source. This favourite story of mediaeval Christendom, the chosen theme alike of poet and painter, which we see pictured above so many altars, and carved in stone on so many tombs, has never been handled with finer or more reverent feeling.

The following passage gives some further details as to Mr. Burne-Jones method. “His first process in the creation of a picture is in the crystallisation of the floating visions in his mind into a design carefully drawn out in chalk or pencil. This is generally modified from time to time, while numerous studies for every detail are carried out in the intervals of other works. In the case of a large picture, this is, as a rule, followed by a cartoon painted in watercolour of the same size as the proposed canvas, and finished elaborately from a small coloured sketch. From this the final work is copied, and further studies are made before the painting is begun. Each stage of this is left to dry thoroughly, often for months at a time, before another is commenced. When the last has been concluded, the whole is left for several years before it is permitted to be varnished, an operation which Mr Burne-Jones always prefers to perform himself with scrupulous care.

Another point of interest which the writer draws attention is the marked influence which the poet Chaucer exercises on this master’s early work. His first oil panting was suggested by the Prioress’s Tale, and since then many of his carefully finished designs have been devoted to the “Romance of the Rose,” and “The Legende of Goode Women.” There is, indeed, much in common with the father of English poets and our nineteenth century painter. In both we have the same passionate love of birds and flowers, the same delight in decorative fancies. And it is perhaps something of the same deep and tender melancholy, born of infinite longing, that wakes in the heart of both the old singer anf=d the modern artist-

“Whanne they may here the birdes singe,

And see the flowres and the leaves springe,

And of that longing commeth heviness.”

This sympathy with Chaucer, the writer remarks, is shared by the poet of the Earthly Paradise, who in the Envoi of his great poem speaks of him as “My master Geoffrey Chaucer.” The classical gads and heroes of Mr Morris’s epic and of Mr. Burne-Jones’s pictures have more affinity with Chaucer’s “half Pagan, half Christianised deities,” than with the gods of Homer and Virgil. They are “Dan Cupid and his mother Saint Venus; Pluto, the king of fayere, who quotes Soloman and Ecclesiastes, and Prosperine who cites the Christian Martyrs, and the Gesta Romanorum.

Mr Bell proceeds to give us a very full and accurate account of the painter’s decorative work, a branch of art which has carried his fame far beyond the limits of his native land, and has made his name familiar to many who have never seen his pictures. In Mr. Morris he has been fortunate in finding a mind so completely in sympathy with his own that the two have been able to work together in perfect harmony. “The one has never faltered in design, and the other in execution.” Many of the artist’s finest designs for stained glass are reproduced here, the great building of the Temple at Boston, the wonderful Angeli laudantes and Angeli ministrantes of Salisbury Cathedral, the Holy Women of St Giles’, Edinburgh Jepthah’s Daughter, Ruth and Miriam; the Norse Sea-Kings and Gods of Walhalla, who adorn the walls of a distant home across the Atlantic. Here, too, we see again some of those noble and exquisite imaginings which have taken place in mosaic or gesso, the glittering peacock which speaks of an undying love and an immortal hope blended together in one, and the glorious Archangels, who with their feet washed by the River of Life, guard the golden ramparts of the New Jerusalem.

We may form some idea of the extent of Mr. Burne-Jones’s labours in this direction when we examine Mr Bell’s lengthy catalogue of the cartoons for stained glass which have been designed since 1857. Even this list is not complete, and a rapid glance over the twelve pages reveals more than one omission. Several of the windows at Middleton Cheney are left out, and there is no mention of the beautiful little Good Shepherd window in the church of St. Peter’s, London Docks. In conclusion we should like to draw attention to a few slips-notably in the spelling of Italian names-which should be corrected in future editions, and would also point out that the tablet in gesso at Mells was erected, not, as we are told here, in memory of Lady Littleton, but of Mrs. Alfred Littleton. In spite of such minor defects this sumptuous volume will, we feel sure, be hailed with delight by many who have visited the new Gallery this winter. And it will, we hope, help many more to realise, better than they have ever done before, the permanent and enduring qualities of this great master’s work. Mr Knowles has recently told us that Lord Tennyson once said in his hearing, “To get the workmanship as nearly perfect as possible is the best chance for going down the stream of time.” That Mr. Burne-Jones’s art has this claim to immortal remembrance, no one who has studied this book is likely to deny.