Ruskin’s behalf, which Whistler never forgave or forgot. Fitzgerald is an able guide to many things, but brings expert knowledge of flowers to Burne-Jones’s use of them in his paintings. She evidently travelled far in search of his pictures, his decorative schemes and stained glass, and, although her critical analysis remains pleasingly light, she can be very discerning. His art, she concludes, is ‘based on ideas and treatments that had lingered for years in his mind, a mind that was obliged to repeat certain obsessional patterns corresponding to the inner life’.
Alongside the procession of paintings that runs through this book are the many friendships which Burne-Jones enjoyed with writers and artists: with Swinburne and George Eliot; with ‘Tad’ – Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the jocular painter of domestic scenes in ancient Greek and Roman times – with the painter of moral allegories G. F. Watts, with Ford Madox Brown, Val Prinsep and others. To some extent Fitzgerald’s rich knowledge of Victorian art may have been stimulated by her friendship with the White Russian émigré and former Tate curator, Mary Chamot, who knew a great deal about Burne-Jones and kick-started the research for this book by lending its author the notebook Burne-Jones filled during a trip to Italy in 1871, a fact mentioned in Hermione Lee’s indispensable biography of Penelope Fitzgerald.
The overall tone of Fitzgerald’s biography of Burne-Jones is affectionate and admiring. But it does not ignore the tragic notes, which increase as time goes on. Burne-Jones is particularly saddened by the mental confusion that engulfed Ruskin and by Morris’s decline. He is deeply moved by the sight of Morris’s coffin on a haywain decorated with moss and entwined with striplings of willow. It was the exact opposite, Fitzgerald notes, of Lord Leighton’s funeral, for the former President of the Royal Academy had lain in state in Burlington House before a public procession took him to his funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral. But it was Morris, not Leighton, that Burne-Jones had in mind when he wrote to May Gaskell,‘… the King was being buried, and there was none other left’. Throughout this book, the reader’s sympathy with Burne-Jones steadily deepens. Fitzgerald describes him at the beginning of 1898, aged sixty-five, his clothes now frequently crumpled, unlike the ‘ridged’ trousers worn by his fashionable son Phil, after much careful ironing. Burne-Jones was, we are told, ‘more puzzled than ever by a world which was too arrogant to recognise that its restlessness was the result of a neglect of beauty’. Under the influence of this book’s persuasive portrait, it is hard not to agree.
Frances Spalding
2014
Permission to reproduce illustrations has been kindly given by the following: Victoria & Albert Museum for photographs of Mrs Pat Campbell, May Morris, William Morris, Margaret Burne-Jones and Kate Vaughan; Sotheby’s on behalf of a private owner for Georgiana Burne-Jones by Burne-Jones; British Museum for cartoons of Burne-Jones in middle age (from Letters to Katie, by permission of Macmillan London and Basingstoke); London Borough of Hammersmith Public Libraries for photographs of the Burne-Jones and Morris families, Georgiana Burne-Jones by Edward Poynter, Edward Burne-Jones and his son Phil, and Edward Burne-Jones and Angela Mackail; St Cecilia’s Window, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Christ Church Cathedral.
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in future editions.
Burne-Jones regarded with gloomy distaste the prospect of becoming the subject of a biography. Yet he was a late Romantic, whose pictures, on his own admission, are a series of images scarcely to be understood without a knowledge of the life which projected them. In this book I have tried to trace faithfully the daily life with its successes and disasters which he accepted with a modest irony peculiarly his own, and the inner life of a painter who might have said, with Jung: ‘If I had left these images hidden in my emotions, they might have torn me in pieces.’
Any biographer of Burne-Jones must start from the Memorials collected during the six years after his death by his wife Georgiana, and from the materials for it which she deposited in a tin box in the Fitzwilliam Museum. There are, however, many other sources, particularly for the second part of his career, from 1870 to 1898. Most of the bibliography given at the end of this book consists of contemporary accounts and reminiscences. But beyond these there are diaries, notebooks and work-lists and more than three thousand letters written by Burne-Jones to his friends, who kept them out of affection, even when they were asked to throw them away
My gratitude is due to the following people for their kindness and hospitality, and for generously allowing me to make use of papers in their possession: Miss Mary Chamot, who encouraged me to begin to research, and Professor W.E. Fredeman, who explained to me how to set about it; Mr Oliver Bagot, Mr Francis Cassavetti, Mrs Imogen Dennis, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, the Dowager Lady Hardinge of Penshurst, Mr George Howard, Mrs Celia Rooke, Mr Lance Thirkell, Lady Tweedsmuir and the Society of Antiquaries of London.
I should also like to thank the following people who have answered enquiries and helped me in many different ways: Mrs Raymond Asquith, Lord Baldwin of Bewdley, Mme Marielle de Baissac, Mr Wilfrid Blunt, Mr Toby Buchan, Dr Raymond Chapman, Mr Charles Carrington, Mr Leslie Cavan, Lord and Lady Clwyd, Mr Norman Colbeck, Dr Malcolm Easton, Professor Leon Edel, Dr Irmgard Feldhaus (Clemens-Sels Museum), Lady Gibson, Miss Phyllis Giles (Fitzwilliam Museum Library), Sir William Gladstone, Professor Gordon Haight, Miss L.F. Hasker (Hammersmith Borough Libraries), Mr Philip Henderson, Miss Helen Henschel, Mr Charles Jerdein, Mr Jeremy Maas, Lady Mander, Professor Roderick Marshall, Mrs June Moll (University of Texas at Austin), Mr David Masson (Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds), Mr Tom Nelson, Mr Peter Norton, Mr Richard Ormond, Mrs Dorothy Parish, Mr Terry Pepper, Mrs Louis Reynolds, Mrs Mary Ryde, Mr A.C. Sewter, Mr E.E.F. Smith (Clapham Antiquarian Society), Mr D.E. Clayton-Stamm, Miss Susie Svoboda, Mr E.F. Thomas (churchwarden of St Margaret’s, Rottingdean), Mr W.S. Taylor, Mr F.H. Thompson (Society of the Antiquaries of London), Mr Raleigh Trevelyan, Mrs Elizabeth Wansbrough, Miss M. Walls (The Grange Museum, Rottingdean). In particular I should like to thank Mr John Christian for his patience and expert knowledge in correcting the typescript; the staff of the Print Rooms of the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Watts Galleries, Compton, the William Morris Galleries, Walthamstow; and my own family.
The following publishers have kindly given permission for extracts quoted in the text: George Allen & Unwin (The Winnington Letters edited by Van Akin Burd); Peter Davies Ltd (The Macdonald Sisters by Lord Baldwin, and The Young du Maurier edited by Daphne du Maurier); the Yale University Press (The Letters of George Eliot edited by Gordon S. Haight).
P.M.F.
Edward Burne-Jones was born on 28 August 1833, as Edward Coley Burne Jones, the only surviving child of Edward Richard Jones. He never knew his sister, who died in infancy, nor his mother, who died a few days after his birth, but he felt all through his life that he had lost them and sorely missed them.
Mr Jones was a not even moderately successful Birmingham gilder and frame-maker. He was probably of Welsh descent, but his ancestry is lost among many Joneses; as Burne-Jones pointed out when he at last took the step of hyphenating his name; to be called Jones is to ‘face annihilation’. He did not know the Christian names of his grandparents on either side: his mother might have been more likely to keep the family annals, but she was dead.
The