One by one the great men are leaving us, and the dying century takes with it into the darkness those whose names are written largest on its annals. This has been a terrible decade, and a sad year. The latest of its victims is he who was until the other day the most individual, the most interesting, of our surviving painters, and his death leaves only one of the four great figures of our art upstanding. Sir Edward-Burne-Jones has gone, and now only Mr Watts remains to remind this generation that a man may be at once a poet and a painter. Doubtless humanity tends to replace its own losses, but it is strangely difficult to see how England is to fill the place of the great men who have during the last ten years ceased to utter for her the voice of the highest poetry. Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, William Morris are gone and have left no successor; and of their few counterparts among the painters we have lost Leighton, Millais, and now Burne-Jones. Who is to succeed these men? It is one of the curious paradoxes of contemporary history that, while the admiration for this poetic art is not declining, but increasing among the cultivated classes in England, the professional artists are moving further and further away from it. The men and women of London who care for art will throng to see an exhibition of Burne-Jones or Watts; collectors are increasingly eager to secure their pictures; but there is not a man among the young artists of talent-and the name of these is legion-who appears to see life and art from their point of view, or anything like it. There never was so much young ability in the studios, but the tide is running away from Botticelli and Van Eyck, towards Valasquez and Rubens-of course as these masters are seen through modern French eyes. What poetry there is, is that which comes from a subtle obscuration of natural fact. Imagination is discredited, and there is no one who allows his fancy to run out towards legend, magic, or mystery.

But magic and mystery are the key-words of the remarkable man whose sudden death we are now reporting. That this artist of the Celtic name and the Celtic nature, sprung from an ancestry among whom no artistic gift is traceable, was a paradox in his very birth. He was born at Birmingham, of all places in the world, in 1833-he who should have seen the light among some western islands, or“Where Helicon breaks down In cliffs to the sea.”

Though Birmingham, fifty years before, had given birth to David Cox, and though by some strange perversity it had produced a whole school of engravers whose achievement was to translate into black and white the most poetic dreams of Turner, it was in 1833 a town of unmitigated ugliness and uncompromising prose. It is bad enough now, in spite of progress, art galleries, and enlightenment; but in the thirties and forties, when young Jones was growing up and learning his classics under Prince Lee and Dr Gifford at King Edwards’s School, it was a town built to starve all germs of poetry with which a lad might be endowed. But in this case they were not killed, and at Oxford they made a sudden growth under the stimulus of William Morris’s friendship, the writings of Ruskin, and the kindness of that benefactor to the young Pre-Raphaelites Mr Combe of the Claverdon Press. Many writers have lately told the story of young Burne-Jones first sight of an illustration by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and of his quickly taken vow of fealty to art, thus understood. Many have told of the first meeting of the young man and the artist poet-not much older-in the rooms of the Working Men’s College in 1856. In W B Scott’s memoirs is to be found the letter, dated the following February, in which Rossetti wrote of the two young men recently come-up from Oxford “They are now very intimate friends of mine….both are men of real genius. Jones’s designs are marvels of finish and imagination, unequalled by anything, unless perhaps Albert Durer’s finest works.” But it was no mere mutual “admiration society” that was thus formed; it was an association of moment for the history of English art. For twenty years the new man worked, observed by few till he had trained his hand to a rare perfection and till his new, independent, and delightful art had dominated a small but powerful group of votaries, with the late Mr William Graham at their head. Then came the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, and the exhibition of “The Days of Creation” and “The Beguiling of Merlin”; and from that moment the battle was won. That is to say the movement invidiously called “aesthetic,” which had been in progress for some years past, and which had been fostered by the publication of Rossetti’s “Poems” and “The Earthly Paradise,” had found its painter. With all its absurdities and extravagances-features from which no movement is free-that current of a certain feeling had this of good in it, that it was a protest in the midst of an industrial and materialistic age, in favour of beauty, and of a united effort to bring some of it into the life of every day. It was not only in his pictures that Burne-Jones supported, in a manner, led this movement; he did as much by his designs for stained glass and tapestries and by his book illustrations, both of them carried out through a long series of years by Morris. His work in the former department may be seen in many a church, at home and abroad; in the latter it may be seen by anyone who just now visits the King’s Library at the British Museum, and studies the cases in which are exposed the beautiful productions of the Kelmscott Press. Here we can supplement the impression made by the artist’s pictures, and study his strong points and weak together. We find in the first place an extraordinary wealth of invention, proceeding, it is true, upon one system, but it is marvellous for the variety of its detail. Nothing was so remarkable as this in the Burne-Jones exhibition organized at the New Gallery in 1893; the types of character and face may have been monotonous, but the decorative abundance, especially in the multitude of pencil drawings, was exuberant like that of nature herself in summertime. We find next, if no direct reference to the world in which we live today, at least a constant undercurrent of reference; pity for the woe of the world, charity, and love-though it be “love among the ruins.” In his paintings, though a strict technical criticism finds abundant fault with them, we find all this, and in addition a loveliness of colour of which modern art gives few examples. Colour of the most splendid is in “Chant d’Amour” “Cophetua”; colour of he most delicate in the “Pygmalion” series. Was he himself satisfied? We know he was not; “I can only come near to what I wish, and am unhappy in consequence,” he said to his friend Scott; but that is only to say he was an artist, and an artist who “saw visions and dreamed dreams.”

But Burne-Jones was much more than an artist; he was a most loveable man. It might be interesting were we writing a treatise on artistic development to compare with his fellows and friends with the broad geniality of Millais, the courtly urbanity of Leighton, the thorniness of Ford Madox Brown, the alternative fits of sociability and morbidness that charmed and distressed the friends of Rossetti. But it is enough to say that Burne-Jones was unlike them all in his unfailing charm. Modest, sincere, and happy, in spite of his feeling that as an artist he had been born out of his due time, he loved his freedom and he loved his friends. He was over-persuaded into joining the Royal Academy, to please Leighton and a few others, and when he resigned he rejoiced in his recovered freedom like a child running out of school. He liked now and then to mix with the great world.

My Comments

This obituary is very much shorter than those accorded Leighton and Millais in The Times in 1896. It is, I think more perceptive in its assessment of the man, his art, and his times. The obituarist clearly sees the approaching eclipse of academic art, and the triumph of Impressionism, a form of art, which Burne-Jones heartily despised. Also foreshadowed is the total divorce of art from any form with which the public could relate and appreciate. The long road to the total absurdity of much which is regarded as art by the establishment today is clearly seen.

Edward Burne-Jones the man is described with perception and sympathy, and something of his unique personal charm comes through. The artist was a combination of asceticism, wistfulness, and a mischievous sense of humour. He was gentle, and had a sense of humour which was also gentle, and did not rely on the discomfiture of other people. Though not a socialist like his great friend William Morris, Burne-Jones clearly saw and disliked the materialism, greed, and exploitation of the day. He heartily disliked the British Empire, and was far-sighted enough to see that it could not last indefinitely. For a considerable time Burne-Jones used the services of Thomas Matthews Rooke (1842-1942), as his studio assistant. Rooke had an excellent memory and recorded many of their conversations at the end of each working day between the years 1895 and 1898. Following his master’s death the faithful Rooke gave this record to Georgiana Burne-Jones. A record of their conversations, edited by Mary Lago was published by John Murray of London in 1982. This book, which is called “Burne-Jones Talking” is invaluable, and Edward Burne-Jones the man seems to step off the page