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Victorian Art in Britain |
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Buscot Park, Faringdon, Oxfordshire.
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The Home of The Briar Rose. The Most Complete Cycle of Paintings by Edward Burne-Jones. Buscot Park is a large 18th country house near Faringdon in Oxfordshire. The house is actually situated on the A417 Lechlade Road. It is a National Trust House, but remains the home of the third Lord Faringdon, who largely runs the house, owns the paintings, and still buys paintings to extend the collection, which is highly impressive, containing works by van Dyke, Rembrandt, and Rubens. For afficionados of 19th century art the main attraction is the salon which contains the greatest, and most complete set of works by Burne-Jones, The Legend of the Briar Rose. The History of The Briar Rose Paintings. These four inter-linked pictures were the work of twenty years. The idea of using the Sleeping Beauty legend seems to have started to form in Burne-Jones’s mind in 1870, and at that time the first large studies were made. The shape and form of the finished pictures seems to have gradually coalesced in the painter’s imagination. In 1872 Burne-Jones sold three substantial oils on this theme to William Graham, his most important patron. In the early 1880s he started work on a much larger set of Briar Rose paintings, and we know that in 1884 he was working on the Prince Entering the Briar Wood. Burne-Jones borrowed some armour at this time, and he also commissioned some bespoke armour, which was purely the product of design, with no basis in fact. He did this because he wished to remove any reference to a particular historical period-the paintings were to be a pure product of his imagination. In 1885 he seems to have given up working on the work he had produced so far, and he started again on new canvasses. In 1889 all other work by the painter stopped whilst he laboured to complete these paintings, which were completed in 1890.The paintings were bought by Agnews of Bond Street in 1890 for £15,000, an enormous sum at the time, and exhibited in their gallery in April. They were exhibited in Liverpool and Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, to allow less privileged people to see them without charge. The paintings were bought from Agnews by Alexander Henderson a rich financier, later first Lord Faringdon. Henderson was a great patron of the arts, and a friend of J W Waterhouse who painted a number of paintings of female members of his family.
The frame has the following short poem by Morris :
‘The fateful
slumber floats and flows In this painting the knight comes through the wood and discovers the sleeping soldiers. The background is dark and heavy, with the thick spiked briars predominating, and giving a sinister, threatening effect. The Council Chamber.
The
Morris poem on the frame is :-
‘The threat
of war the hope of peace
‘The maiden
plaisance of the land The weavers have fallen asleep at their loom, with the castle in the far background and more of the briars also in evidence. The weavers are of the typical Burne-Jones type, and they are elegantly posed, creating a fluid overall shape. with blue predominating in the draperies. To All the treasure that shall be Come fated heart the gift to take And smite the sleeping world awake.’ The Briar Rose Paintings Overall. In this set of paintings we see the mature work of one of our greatest artists at it’s best. The overall scheme the painter was able to carry out produced an integrated, elegant effect, and an atmosphere of tranquillity. It was Burne-Jones criticism of the Impressionists that they created atmosphere but nothing else. In this series of pictures he created atmosphere by careful design and harmony of colour. These paintings were, and remain the major achievement of the second generation Pre-Raphaelites, by it’s greatest artist. The salon in which they are situated has an atmosphere of beauty and serenity. I visit Buscot each year to look again at the Briar Rose, always see something new to enjoy, and always come away refreshed. Please Note.
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