Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  It is rather a surprise to find that Burne-Jones, who had had so little instruction himself, had now begun teaching at the Working Men’s College. Ruskin was still attending there, having abolished the too-popular modelling classes (from which ‘men appeared smudged with white clay’), in favour of more serious drawing. Ned (who appears in the records as Edward Burne Jones, Exeter College, Oxford, Painter, giving him a dignity he hardly possessed) acted at first as assistant to Madox Brown; later he had his own drawing class, the Figure and Animals, on Mondays and Fridays. One must hope that he was never called upon to do horses, which always worried him; though his sketches in the Victoria and Albert suggest he had very poor models, probably cab horses. But Ned was an excellent teacher. From his first lessons with Louie Macdonald to the very night he died he continued to help and encourage beginners.

  Once again, it is a drawing by Rossetti which gives us Ned’s appearance at the time, with his first beard and sad, very light eyes. This is a study for the head of Jesus in Rossetti’s Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, for which the dazzling actress Louisa Herbert had been persuaded to sit. The Magdalene’s figure, however, with its brawny arms, was taken from a Scandinavian prostitute of the tough, good-natured type – according to G.A. Sala, the original Jenny. ‘The Magdalene was taken from a strapping Scandinavian,’ Burne-Jones told Rooke. ‘She was a splendid woman, beyond doubt … she always used to call me Herr Jesus quite seriously, not knowing my name – which pleased him exceedingly.’6

  The courtesy of this scene is a reminder that Burne-Jones in these early days did try to act upon the pity for women which is evident in The Cousins. He brought home an ‘unfortunate’ to Red Lion Square for Mary to feed and clothe – it is to Mary’s credit that she didn’t object to this – and a little later we have a glimpse of him rescuing a drunken woman from a small crowd of onlookers and taking her to safety.

  ‘1859 March 6 Sunday,’ Boyce wrote in his diary, ‘Crowe Faulkner Jones and self rowed to Godstow to see “stunner”, the future Mrs W. Morris. On return all dined at Topsy’s including Swinburne: Morris and Swinburne mad and deafening with excitement.’ Ned was at Oxford to see about Powell’s commission for the Christ Church window; a few weeks later he met Boyce on a quieter occasion, escorting him and his sister to see the illuminated manuscript of the Roman de la Rose in the British Museum. On the 26 April he was back in Oxford for Morris’s wedding. Georgie and her sisters came down with him, Dixon, now a curate, performed the ceremony, but this could not have eased the feeling of separation as Morris and Janey set off for their wedding journey. Worse still, The Revd George Macdonald had been appointed to the Manchester circuit, and in September Georgie left London with her family.

  At this desolate moment Val Prinsep and Charlie Faulkner suggested a tour of Italy. Presumably Ned had been paid by Powell & Co. for his window designs, so he could afford to go. ‘Dear little Carrots,’ he wrote to Swinburne, who was still supposed to be writing labels for the Frideswide, ‘the saving grace is that I am soon to see Florence for the first time.’

  ‘My dear Browning,’ Rossetti wrote on 21 September, ‘you know my friend Edward Jones very well; only being modest, he insists you do not know him well enough to warrant his calling on you in Florence.’ It was a pity, after the kindheartedness of this, that the party in fact missed the Brownings and only came across them for a short time in the cathedral in Siena. They travelled in four weeks through Paris, Marseilles, Genoa, Livorno, Pisa, Florence, Venice, Milan and back by rail through the Mont Cenis pass. Ned spoke no Italian and, so he declared, only one word of French – ‘oui’; this according to Ruskin, was an advantage, as speaking the language leads to the ‘enviable misadventures’ which are so tedious to hear about afterwards. These misadventures, perhaps because Prinsep, who had studied at Gleyre’s, spoke French so well, certainly took place: after Faulkner left they came home penniless, having had nothing but coffee and a roll for two days and having crossed the Channel in the worst storm of the year.

  Ned, who was ill nearly all the way, and every time they got into a railway carriage, must have been something of a nuisance, but Prinsep saw that he was suffering from something more than ‘Ravenna fever’: the overwhelming impact of the Brera, the Uffizi, the Pitti and the Accademia and, still more, the sight of Italian painting at home in its own cities. He had made a number of copies from Old Master paintings – ‘working at pictures’ is his own description – and seems to have been particularly struck by the early frescoes. Venice was ‘bright and stunning’, and Italy itself was an enlargement of existence so great that he only allowed himself to go there three times again in his life, feeling that every visit had to be earned.

  ‘I have worked very hard at art for two years and find it difficult to live’, Ned had written to Miss Sampson, who complained from Birmingham that her old age was not being provided for. This was true enough, and yet life without Georgie was unbearable. In the end the situation was resolved by the kindly intervention of Madox Brown, who gave the young couple a chance to see more of each other by inviting Georgie for a month’s visit to their home in Fortress Terrace, Kentish Town. For the past few years Brown had been through all kinds of difficulty – even his wife’s shawl had had to go into pawn – and yet in 1860 Georgie was not ever made aware of the strain an extra guest would put on the household. The young lovers could meet discreetly at musical evenings, or at dinners where only good friends sat round the table laid with the large cheap willow-pattern plates which the Pre-Raphaelites favoured, as the only honest pattern available.

  Ned hesitated, a pilgrim at the gates of love. He had about £30 ready money in the world, and to this Georgie could add only a small table and the wood-engraving tools which she had been given for her course at South Kensington. There was some plain deal furniture at Russell Place. Mr Plint suddenly sent £25 ‘which you may need just now’ nearly doubling Ned’s capital; but he now owed a good deal of work to Mr Plint.

  In the Academy of 1859 Hughes had exhibited his Long Engagement under its original title from Troilus and Criseyde.

  For how might ever sweetness have been known

  To hym that never tasted bitterness?

  The four years’ wait had been bitterness enough for Georgie and Ned, and they reached a decision which was quite unworldly. Georgie went home to make her preparations – not very elaborate ones, as she seems to have taken an old pair of boots on her honeymoon – and Ned passed what the Memorials call an ‘unsettled week’, not in putting his lodgings in a fit state, but in painting ‘kind and cruel ladies’ on a deal sideboard. They were married in the church which is now Manchester Cathedral and, as they had promised, on 9 June 1860 – the anniversary of the death of Beatrice.

  Dante, and Rossetti himself, were indeed very much in their minds. On 23 May – the day of Dante’s birth – Gabriel had married Elizabeth Siddal. The young Joneses were to join them in Paris; Georgie had never been abroad before. They started south from Manchester to Dover, stopping for the first night at Chester. But here nervous worry caused Ned to fall ill, and Georgie started her married life as a sick nurse in a strange hotel bedroom. Her spirits were strong enough for this: Lord Baldwin tells us that they only wavered when her coral necklace broke and she had to go down on hands and knees to look for the rolling beads.

  From Paris, Rossetti sent her an encouraging letter: ‘Dear Georgie (do let me please, or else Ned shall punch my head as soon as he is well) …’7 Although he marvels that Ned and Georgie could ‘get up life to notice anything’ in such a dull place as Chester, he finds Paris equally dull, and the French are absurd, translating ‘potage à la Reine’ as ‘soup to the Queen’. They are ‘quite sick of it here’, Lizzie is not well enough to see the sights and they will soon be back in England. Long before they had expected, therefore, Ned and Georgie started their new life in London.

  6

  1860–2

  EXPANSION: THE FIRM, RUSKIN AND ITALY

  Only two
people very much in love could have looked with confidence at the Russell Place rooms. They had not even been tidied since Ned left, the water-supply was poor – Poynter, who lived there afterwards, had to save water by washing up in a slop-basin – and there were no chairs. The only reliable article of furniture was a solid oak table made at the Boys’ Home in Euston Road,1 which is still in family use. But Mrs Catherwood did not forget their love of music, and sent a small plain walnut piano. Burne-Jones set to work to decorate this.

  His idea was to make the decoration answer to the music itself. What he liked best were stringed instruments (‘the rumble of the ’cello comforts my belly,’ he said),2 accompanied voices, and as soon as he had a chance to hear it, ‘old Italian music’ – Carissimi and Stradella. His reaction, he said, was ‘entirely emotional’. The little piano shows Death on the left-hand side, corresponding to the two bass octaves; his face is hidden by a veil. On the right there are seven seated girls, in olive, brown and white, listening to a stringed instrument for the extreme treble. Whereas Death is crowned and veiled, the girls are simplified into rounded shapes, but the two parts are connected by the feeling that Death also is listening to the music; at some point the girls will realise that he is only a step away. Determined that Georgie’s piano should not fade like the Union murals, Ned used lacquer and deepened the colour with a red-hot poker. In the event, the colour lasted longer than the works of the piano. The decoration does not ‘represent’ music but is an exact equivalent of the piano’s music, just as Browning’s Galuppi is the equivalent of the toccata which made him ‘feel chilly … I grow old’.

  Georgie’s singing was not at all ambitious. She set Rossetti’s Song of the Bower to a waltz, and Keats’s In a drear-nighted December to Beethoven’s piano sonata Op. 10, No. 2, and, if the company felt like it, she would sit at the little piano until two or three in the morning, lending a charming air of spirited respectability to their bohemian evenings.

  Possibly the red-hot poker was suggested by a new friend, William de Morgan, who, although he did not start experimenting in pottery glazes till the 1870s, was always a great deviser of dodges. De Morgan at this time was only just out of the Academy schools, and it was he and Burne-Jones between them who were accused by the outspoken little maid of losing the key of the beer barrel; amazing that there should be a little maid at all, when Mrs Beeton, in 1861, gives £150 p.a. as the correct income for employing a maid-of-all-work (and a girl occasionally). Another view of Russell Place is given by the young George du Maurier, recently arrived from Paris, and introduced by Val Prinsep: his visit made his dream of ‘five o’clock tea with stunning fellows chatting with Emma [his fiancée]’, and a piano ‘rendered of untold value by my important paintings’. Georgie, who felt that it was ‘well to be amongst those who painted pictures and wrote poetry’, was glad to welcome two poets among her callers, even though, until some rush-bottomed chairs arrived, she had to receive them sitting on the table; the poets were Allingham and Swinburne. William Allingham, the author of the Day and Night Songs where Ned had seen Rossetti’s illustrations to the Maids of Elfenmere, now wrote his fairy poems from the safe employment of a customs officer in Lymington. He was serious and sensitive, ‘talking of Christianity, Dante, Tennyson and Browning’. Later in life he became finical and difficult, was obsessed with germs, refused to touch door-handles, and had to be forcibly got up and dressed, though his Anglo-Irish charm never faded. But whereas Allingham, in 1860, was a presentable mid-Victorian version of a poet, Swinburne had to be accepted by his hosts as a kind of fiery freak or phenomenon, who at the end of the evening would be extinguished by drink and had to be sent home, labelled, in a cab, or, as Rossetti put it, ‘describing geometrical curves on the pavement’. He was still only twenty years old. In such a creature a capacity for affection is an added danger, and Swinburne’s friends could be divided into those who were and were not good for him. He was sympathetic to young married couples, nesting peacefully in their happiness. He amused both Janey Morris and Lizzie Siddal: the Memorials record that when in this same year, 1860, they went to the theatre ‘in our thousands’ it was Lizzie who declared that the boy selling playbooks was frightened at seeing her own red hair at one end of the row and Swinburne’s at the other: ‘good Lord, there’s another of ‘em!’ This is one of Lizzie’s few recorded remarks, and one can feel in the story Georgie’s affection for them both, heightened by her excitement at going to a theatre at all.

  The description given in the Memorials is startlingly vivid, and conveys the shock of pure beauty which Georgie felt when Lizzie took off her bonnet in the upstairs room of their Hampstead lodgings, and shook out the gleaming folds of the famous hair. As a minister’s daughter, Georgie could see the best in everyone and get on passably with most, but she loved Rossetti’s wife. To Georgie was written the most touching of Lizzie’s remaining letters, sending ‘a willow pattern dish full of love to you and Ned’.3

  In spite of the confusion, the beer barrel and Georgie’s dressmaking, Burne-Jones felt a physical release and a new ability to work. His two real apprentice pieces, which mark the beginning of an individual style, are the Sidonia and Clara Van Bork, now in the Tate Gallery. Sidonia the Sorceress, in a translation published in 1849 of William Meinhold’s Sidonia Von Bork, die Klosterhexe, was the book which Rossetti had been pressing upon all his followers. ‘You seem mighty scandalised about Sidonia – I have never read the book,’ Ruskin wrote to Ellen Heaton. ‘Edward only told me that she was a witch.’ Although Malcolm Bell calls it a ‘most entrancing novel’, it is not at all like Sintram, having the strong savour which pleased Rossetti, and Ned may have hesitated before finding a scene for illustration. One can hardly imagine his Sidonia dancing, as she does in the book, on the coffin of her suffocating sister to drown her feeble cries, or fighting off the sexual assaults of the courtiers ‘with hands and feet’. They are two grave little water-colours, in which Burne-Jones selected the incident of the bees which try to reach Sidonia’s golden hair through its net, and her gentle sister Clara carrying a nest of young doves.

  For Sidonia’s oddly-patterned dress he studied a portrait of Isabella d’Este at Hampton Court; the galleries there, open to the public since 1830, were a centre for all students of art – Sass took his school there in a body, making them take off their hats before the Raphael cartoons. But for the deep blacks and shadowed whites, Burne-Jones made his first attempt at imitating the colour of the Arnolfini.

  When they were finished, Ned, anxious to help with the troubles in Birmingham, wrote to his father to make frames to them. But even these two frames, for pictures about one foot by six inches, taxed Mr Jones to the uttermost. Asked to make a mirror with roundels, like the one in the Arnolfini portrait, he faltered, and although it appears in Fair Rosamund and Queen Eleanor, it had to be returned to his workshop, where it stayed, the ends never quite meeting. However, the Sidonia, with its frame, went to Mr Plint in time for Christmas that year.

  How were the young Joneses supported? We have seen the kindness of Rossetti and Ruskin in recommending possible buyers (not always successfully: Miss Ellen Heaton of Leeds, for instance, flatly refused the early Cupid’s Forge which Ruskin pressed upon her). There were Mr Plint’s small cheques; there was an element of sheer chance – once Ned found half a sovereign unexpectedly at the bottom of his waistcoat pocket. It never occurred to Georgie, brought up in a trusting and praying household, to worry about how their wants would be supplied. To Ned, on the other hand, money worries had been familiar ever since he could walk and talk, yet there was a certain lightheartedness. ‘Never say “bill” – it’s a coarse word,’ he once told Mary Gladstone.4 He had been poor and unhappy; now he was poor and happy.

  For country air, Ned and Georgie were welcome at Red House, the new home ‘strongly built of red brick’ which Philip Webb had designed for Morris and which was now ready for visitors. It was in an old apple orchard at Upton, in Kent, ten miles out of London, and it was not for nothing that
in Morris’s last romance, published in the year of his death, the heroes return to ‘the little hills of Upmead’. Here, from the moment the wagonette met them at Abbey Woods station, Morris and his friends were happy together. Almost anyone was welcome who thought as he did about the crafts. Morris, Ned, Faulkner, Rossetti, Lizzie, and any other visitor immediately set to work at painting the ceiling – never to be quite finished – with red, blue and green diaper patterns; they also, of course, decorated the furniture, though the Red Lion settle and wardrobe were already in place. Janey embroidered hangings, Georgie had brought her engraving tools. In the afternoon the girls jaunted about in the pony trap (Janey had been brought up among horses) exploring Chislehurst common. Ned didn’t care for these expeditions: ‘I hate the country – apples alone keep me in good spirits,’ he wrote to his father; but he gloried in the wine, the practical jokes, and the feeling of hard work together. His paintings of Morris and Janey in the Wedding of Sire Degrevaunt, underneath the gallery from which the guests flung apples at their host, have still not quite faded from the walls.

  Evening was the time for music and hide-and-seek (Janey and Georgie were still only nineteen) and Ned said that he had seen Janey laugh ‘until, like Guinevere, she fell under the table’. In his graceful red chalk sketches for further decorations, Janey is seen in her long mediaeval dress, putting her arms round her husband’s neck from behind. This reminds us that all the young wives were in unfashionable dresses of gathered serge or linen; they had leather belts and embroidered collars and cuffs, in some cases designed by Morris himself.