Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  A check to dining out and going out came to Burne-Jones in June 1866 when his daughter Margaret was born, only three months, it will be noted, after the ceiling collapsed. Although Ned professed to be put out because he could not go to France with Webb and the Morrises,8 and although he was surprised at the baby’s plump aspect and referred to her at first as ‘Fatima’, he was lost, and he soon knew it. He became a victim of the helpless blue-eyed object, indeed he entered upon a lifetime’s slavery. Margaret was born to charm without effort, whereas five-year-old Phil, who had anxiously predicted that the baby would be either a boy or a girl, was rapidly turning into one of the nerviest children in Kensington.

  At the beginning of August 1866, Allingham, who seems to have been sleeping on the sofa at Kensington Square, asked the Jones family to come back with him to Lymington for a seaside holiday. This was cholera year in London, and they accepted gratefully. The outings which he offered his friends were always much the same – a day trip to the Isle of Wight to call on Tennyson, walks in the woods, where Ned did tree studies for the background of the St George series, the beach, dinner. ‘At dinner Ned lauds Luini; speaks of the injustice of the critics, “wonders when people will begin to speak of me decently.”’ On 30 August they went to Winchester to meet Morris and Webb, down from London. The day in the city of King Arthur and the Table Round was not quite as genial as expected, since Morris was infuriated by the restorations at St Cross, and dinner for five at the George cost nineteen shillings and was, Allingham notes, very nasty. On Milford beach the next day ‘we bury Morris up to the neck in shingle’ and one is surprised to find that Morris liked the place and wanted to stay. The next day the weather broke, there was packing to do, good-bye to old Mrs B. at the top of the house who would be hurt if overlooked, a bunch of flowers from Allingham, anxiety over catching the omnibus to the station, another English seaside holiday to join ten thousand gone.

  By going to Hampshire they had missed going north for the joint wedding of Aggie and Louie Macdonald: Aggie was married to Edward Poynter and Louie to Alfred Baldwin at Wolverhampton on 9 August 1866. This natural stage in the life of his two ‘wenches’, Burne-Jones, in spite of himself, regarded as a desertion – by Louie in particular – and Georgie was wise to avoid the wedding. He was at work on figure studies for The Mirror of Venus – young girls amazed at seeing their beauty for the first time under the direction of love – a subject related to Sintram and the reflection in his shield, and to the magic well of the Romance of the Rose; it was one of the images which haunted him every time a young girl whom he cared about married or was threatened with marriage. The Mirror was one of many pictures that went to Graham, who was prepared now to buy almost everything Burne-Jones could finish. When he had first come to the studio Ned, knowing his nonconformist sympathies, had turned the nudes with their faces to the wall, but he soon found that Graham liked them.

  The main task of 1866 – and this was really what Morris had come to Lymington to talk about – was still the Earthly Paradise. As he finished each section (he wrote fifteen thousand lines in 1866–7) he read it aloud to Ned and Georgie, and for the first time we hear of Morris’s readings as an ordeal – Georgie, with two babies to look after, had to stab herself with pins to keep herself awake. All that was needed now was the illustrations.

  To help him with these Burne-Jones had been given, as Allingham noticed, a ‘fine copy’ of the Hypnerotomachia Polyphilii, and this was probably supplied by Morris’s new friend Frederick Ellis, a dealer in manuscripts and rare books at 33 King Street, Covent Garden. Ellis was soon to become the publisher of both Morris and Rossetti, or, as Gabriel put it,

  A publishing party named Ellis

  Addicted to poets with bellies.

  Morris, introduced to the shop by Swinburne, had taken Ned there two years earlier – ‘a pale and fragile-looking young man’ as Ellis remembered him, who ‘eagerly recommended’ Morris to buy (though he would certainly have done this anyway) a magnificent Boccaccio.

  The only complete set of Earthly Paradise illustrations which Burne-Jones finished (though there are many incomplete ones in existence) was Cupid and Psyche; these are plainly derived from the queer, elegant, stiff, Mantegna-like woodcuts of the Hypnerotomachia. What edition of it Ned had remains a puzzle. He could hardly have been allowed to take a copy of the original Aldine Press edition of 1499 on a seaside holiday, for Morris (although he once hurled a ‘fine’ fifteenth-century folio at one of his workmen) was a great bibliophile, refusing to let women turn the pages of his books because they were so clumsy.9 In any case, Ned seems to have been as fascinated by the text as by the mysterious illustrations.

  The author, Friar Colonna, declares in a preface that his Strife of Love in a Dreame (to use the Elizabethan translation) shows ‘the vanitie of this life and the uncertaintie of the delights thereof’, although in fact it does nothing of the sort. The Friar, or Dreamer, after a dispute with Logic, who urges a more prudent course, follows a maze-like quest in search of his lost love, Polia. At last, in an arbour of white jessamine (the ground flower of Botticelli’s Primavera) he finds Polia in green silk blown by the wind and with tiny breasts which, as the Friar points out, would just fit into the hand. The triumph of the Venus of Living Nature passes by (a woodcut across the double page, with chariots and elephants recalling the Mantegnas at Hampton Court). The lovers join in a sacrament at Venus’s altar, where Polia’s torch of virginity is put out and a miraculous briar rose begins to grow. But for the ultimate happiness they wander through ruins and graves of those who have died for love. In the end, the crossing of the magic sea and their union on the island is a deception, for the Dreamer awakes, and the sensation is by no means one of moral enlightenment, but of disappointment.

  The Hypnerotomachia is a book of daunting complexity. Every object and building described (and they are all described) is symbolic in itself and engraved with further symbols. Colonna and his unknown illustrator have no way to express themselves except by ‘meaning within meaning’. But neither had Burne-Jones.

  As soon as Morris had engraved the seventy Cupid and Psyche drawings on wood Ellis ran off the trial proofs, but they were not a success. Gradually even Morris was obliged to concede that if the Big Book was to be perfect – and it could not be less than that – the blocks would have to be redrawn and recut, an impossibly expensive process. The Earthly Paradise, after all the high hopes that had been invested in it, eventually appeared in four parts without illustrations, except for Ned’s title-page design of three girls playing music; he had to bear quietly with Morris’s cutting, which resulted in one of them playing the lute with her elbow. He may even have felt a certain relief at the change of plan after Morris had begun to introduce stories from the northern sagas, an element of ‘raw fish and ice’ which Burne-Jones found quite unsympathetic. But the Big Book, they agreed, was in any case not given up; more than twenty years later it was one of the projects of the Kelmscott Press, and almost to the day of his death Morris still hoped to see it in print. Meanwhile, a sure sign that Burne-Jones was now a truly professional artist was the fact that he did not waste this wealth of designs, but continued to draw on them throughout his life, in many versions and in different media.

  It was Georgie’s idea that the Cupid and Psyche set should be given to Ruskin as a token of gratitude for the Italian journey of 1862. Ruskin, who was not much used to gratitude, was overwhelmed: they were the most precious things he had, ‘next to my Turners’. He gave forty-seven of them, as examples of line drawings, to his school at Oxford. At the British Institution in June 1867, he included in his lecture On the Present State of Modern Art a passage in praise of Burne-Jones, contrasting him as a painter of the imagination with Doré. This lecturer’s habit of contrasting everything with something else, which must necessarily be worse, often clouded Ruskin’s judgement; Ned himself felt that out of thousands of designs Doré made a hundred wonderful ones, ‘which is saying a very great deal’, but he could not help
being moved when Ruskin spoke of his own purity of line and ‘sympathy with the repose of the constant schools’. The example shown was a sketch for the Good Women tapestry, the Two Wives of Jason, and Ruskin made the shrewd comment that this Medea was not a sorceress but a counsellor with ‘authority, dark and inscrutable’.

  This was a moment of something like tranquility in Ruskin’s life. Burne-Jones abandoned an attempt to do the portrait which he had asked for, knowing probably the distress which had been caused when Rossetti tried it – Ruskin’s face, disfigured by a dog-bite, could only be shown in profile without troubling him. But Ruskin could write to Ned, sure of his understanding, about the disturbing visit of Rose La Touche to Denmark Hill; he sometimes painted in Ned’s studio, or they would walk together through Camberwell, Ned teasing him gently by pointing out the Gothic public houses on every corner – ‘your doing, my dear’.

  But at the same time Burne-Jones was seeing much more of Howell; this was in spite of the fact that Georgie had come to distrust him. Neither Georgie nor Morris discussed other people in their absence, Georgie because she did not think it right, and Morris because it did not interest him. Howell, on the other hand, was a gossip, extravagant of his talent, with a confidential close-leaning manner which blinded the flattered listener. In 1867 Burne-Jones consulted him eagerly when Whistler, who had reached his most aggressive stage, quarrelled with Legros and knocked him down in Luke Ionides’s office. Ned, with the same unexpected fighting spirit he had shown in his schooldays, wanted to take Whistler on; Howell, who was a good mimic, offered to do an imitation of Whistler if anyone would volunteer to stand in for Legros.10 Howell, as this incident shows, was nothing if not adaptable. He appeared, too, as a man of taste in all departments, could take the burden off the artist’s shoulders, and would charge nothing for this. He advised watching the market, and said he had bought in Burne-Jones’s pictures at the Anderson Rose sale in 1866 to keep up the prices (though Christie’s records show he bought only one (A Forest Scene) for £6 10s.11). Some things passed imperceptibly into his keeping; according to a list which Ned drew up in 187212 he had an early Danae which disappeared – ‘Howell said it was burnt’. 1866, however, was a year of glory for Howell when he carried out a number of charitable transactions as Ruskin’s secretary, an appointment which Burne-Jones seems to have suggested and later regretted. ‘I once recommended a secretary to him [Ruskin] in glowing terms’, he wrote to Fairfax Murray, ‘and you have it in your power to wipe that disgrace out of my life’.13 This position enabled Howell to regale the company with details about Ruskin’s money matters and his love for Rose La Touche. He expanded, and gave ‘blokes’ dinners’; he got married, everyone was asked, and Ned presented him with a drawing of Lucretia Trying the Sword. The only warning voice was still Warington Taylor, who noted that Howell was ‘buying and selling freely’ and talking of Morris ‘with a disrespectful air of joke’. Yet Burne-Jones continued to see him.

  There is an uneasy sense of wrong direction about all this. When Allingham called on Robert Browning on 21 April 1867, Browning, who had been complaining about Swinburne’s ‘fuzz of words’, improvised two lines

  Don’t play with sharp tools, those are edged ‘uns

  My Ned Jones!

  Both he and Allingham knew that Ned was getting beyond his depth. This was the result not only of his acquaintance with Howell but of what the Memorials call ‘another and very notable introduction in those days … to a part of what may be called the Greek Colony in London’.

  9

  1866–7

  A THREAT TO THE EARTHLY PARADISE

  By ‘the Greek Colony in London’ the Memorials mean us to understand the leading family in the Greek community of Victorian England, the Ionides.1

  The Ionides were a great Phanariot family whose property in Constantinople was seized by the Turks in 1815. The head of the House escaped to England with his wife, who wore round her neck their emergency fund of five gold coins. They left behind them the grandmother, who had gone into retirement after finding her husband crucified on the house door by the Turks.

  Both in Manchester and in London the Ionides prospered, and by the 1860s they were established as importers of cotton, and naturalised as British citizens. Bayswater, and Holland Park in particular, was their colony, and they had become great patrons of the arts; 8 Holland Villas was the home of Constantine, the head of the family, known as Zeus, or the Thunderer; it was the only house he could find large enough for his princely Turkish carpet, and the fine collections which he was to leave to the nation. His sister Aglaia (later Mrs Coronio) was the friend and correspondent of William Morris. His brother Luke was a bon garçon, unsuccessful as a business man but a good companion of artists. Burne-Jones he found ‘the most delightful man it has ever been my good fortune to meet’; they rivalled each other in connoisseurship of bottled Bass, and of Tattooed Ladies at fairs and exhibitions.

  The close family atmosphere and golden hospitality of the Ionides extended to many relations and connections – Sechiaris, Cassavettis, Homeres, Cavafys, Spartalis. Among these Marie Spartali, the tall pale beauty ‘radiating dignity with every movement’, appears and reappears in nineteenth-century memoirs, as she does in Rossetti’s later pictures and Julia Cameron’s photographs. As a young woman in the 1860s, Marie was usually one of a group of three, who were known throughout the Greek community as the Three Graces. The second was Aglaia Ionides, and third was Mary Cassavetti, who was to give Burne-Jones a new image of beauty and a new depth of happiness and unhappiness.

  Mary was born in Athens in 1843, a grand-daughter of the founder of the London House of Ionides. Her father, ‘Hadji’ Cassavetti, although he had done very well in cotton in Alexandria, was looked at a little askance by the Greeks for his easy oriental ways and his dealings with Achmed Ali. But when Mary was only fifteen Hadji died, and by 1858 she had lost three brothers and sisters, leaving only Alexander, eleven years younger than herself and in no way able to control her. That responsibility was left, after the family had come to London, to the head of the family, Constantine.

  Mary’s mother, Euphrosyne, was the formidable ‘Duchess’, the terror of younger relations, though not of her daughter. To a niece, Mrs Cavafy, who tried to make her old clothes ‘do’, she said, ‘You must not continue to wear garments like that, if you want to conserve your husband’s love.’ She was a woman of marked ability who, when her cook failed her, would take over the kitchen herself and whose daily life was conceived in terms of high comedy. In 1878 she wrote to Burne-Jones from Corfu, heaping approaches on him, ‘opening the floodgates’, as he put it to Rossetti, ‘and she has grievances, but she fastens on sorrows … [though] nothing can ever make me angry with her.’2 There was, however, little comedy in the life of her daughter. It cannot be called less than tragic to begin life as the delicious ‘child in Turkish dress’ of Watts’s portrait, and to end, as it is thought, in an asylum.

  Warmth and sexual generosity were the note of Mary’s beauty. When A.C. Ionides, the writer of Ion: A Traveller’s Tale, was a small boy, staying at the Ionides’s Brighton villa, he was ‘larking about at Hobden’s baths’ and fell in. ‘I was put into Mary’s dressing-room … to await dry clothes. Mary proceeded to undress in front of me, and her glorious red hair and almost phosphorescent white skin still shine out from the gloom of the dressing-room.’ At this time she was about twenty-five, a married woman who had left her husband but was still in control of the £80,000 she had inherited on her father’s death; this, at least, was the figure given by Du Maurier in a letter (October 1860) when Mary, ‘rude and unapproachable but of great talent and really wonderful beauty’, was only seventeen. ‘She is supposed to be attached by mere obstinacy to a Greek of low birth in Paris’, added du Maurier, who felt that he had attracted her interest in a ‘significative’ way. But it was not significative, and next year she married her ‘low’ attachment, Demetrius Zambaco, doctor to the Greek community in Paris. She bore him two children in
rapid succession, a boy in 1864 and a girl in 1865.

  Dr Zambaco can only be judged from his one surviving letter3 He writes, as he says, ‘comme je bavarde verbalement’, appears kindly, worried and dull, and describes himself as an expert in the ‘capricieuse santé des personnages distingués. He recommends a digestive tube with which he has caused one of these distinguished persons to absorb 100 bottles of meat extract. It was for this that Mary had exhanged the brilliant London life of the house of Ionides.

  In 1866 she left Paris with the two children and went to her mother’s house at 47 Gloucester Gardens. She had considerable talent as a sculptress and medallist, and she wanted to return to the point of danger where art and society met. The ‘Duchess’ herself was a generous patron of the arts. Delighted to be rid of Dr Zambaco, she offered to commission a picture for Mary, and took her, with Marie Spartali, to the studio of Burne-Jones.

  The subject, in the end, was left to him, and he chose from his Earthly Paradise designs the Cupid Finding Psyche. This allegory of the soul delivered by love was one of his favourites, and he made from it in the end at least seven finished pictures. When the watercolour version was finished he was overwhelmed and had to negotiate the price (forty guineas) through Legros. ‘I am uncertain if, after all, this is a picture which Madame Zambaco or Miss Spartali would have chosen if choice had been possible,’ he wrote to the ‘Duchess’, ‘for although they express the kindest sympathy with my work generally I could understand how preferable some pictures would be to another – and for that very reason that I have tried to do better in this case I may have failed more completely – will you please say this for me.’4 This incoherent letter was sent round ‘by hand’.