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Edward Burne-Jones. Frances Spalding
Читать онлайн.Название Edward Burne-Jones
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isbn 9780007588237
Автор произведения Frances Spalding
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
The Cousins was a great success with the set, and Ned, who had a pleasant deep voice, was asked to read it aloud and although this brought on an agony of shyness and at the end he rushed out of the room. His only other ‘tale’, A Story of the North (February 1858), is almost a pastiche of Sintram. He may perhaps have had a hand in the article on Oxford (April 1856) which looks forward to a time when closed places will be abolished, ‘ruinous colleges’ swept away, ‘and there in the parks will stand the new Museum, all glorious in bright stone, already sobering with time’, while married Fellows return to their domestic hearth, girl undergraduates brighten the streets, and ‘pale students’ are actually allowed to take books out of the Bodleian. This last prophecy is the only one which has not been fulfilled, although the Museum still does not look sober.
The contribution which meant most to Burne-Jones himself was his essay on The Newcomes, in which he found room to praise Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel and Hand and Soul, and his illustration to the Maids of Elfenmere. Though he did not know it as yet, Rossetti had been highly gratified by this article ‘being unmistakeably genuine’. But Ned deliberately did not follow up his beginnings as a writer. He did not, as he had first of all intended, produce articles on Ruskin and Sintram. Very well aware of his limitations, he felt that he would be wrong not to concentrate on the one profession he had chosen.
How did a young man become a painter in 1855? Mr Jones might well have pointed to the expanding Birmingham schools of design, or to Samuel Line’s private school of decoration and engraving (also in Birmingham), which opened at five in the morning. These, of course, supplied designers for Birmingham’s industry. But equally hard work was required of the fine artist, and Birmingham had also been the starting-point of David Cox; his name was revered there and he was now living in honourable retirement at Harborne, on the outskirts. Turner also was much collected, had of course the blessing of Ruskin and had been a close friend of one of his patrons, Mr Gillott the steel-penmaker. Both these successful artists had followed the right way of early apprenticeship, for which Ned was already about ten years too old. Later the water-colourist must hope for old aristocratic or new manufacturing patrons, and the good offices of the Royal Water-Colour Society.
The career of the painter in oils, nobler but less directly useful, was concentrated on the Academy, although the R.A. had not yet reached its period of supreme power which was to come in the seventies and eighties. The painter was trained from childhood. He passed several preliminary years at Sass’s (until poor Sass went mad in the 1830s – then it was Gandish’s), and entered the Academy Schools in his teens. At that very moment Albert Moore and Simeon Solomon were beginning there at the age of sixteen, and Fred Walker, at eighteen, was apprenticed to a wood-engraver while he studied. The course, though shorter than it had been, still meant at least two years’ study of the antique before life drawing was permitted. Until recognition came, the ‘artist professed’ kept body and soul together by doing illustrations, ornamental capital letters (a great resource), wood-cutting and engraving (the Dalziel brothers and Lane employed as many as forty ‘peckers’ on their special editions) – even, as Madox Brown had had to do, by preparing calotypes.
The wood engraver was described as looking wistfully out from his lamp-lit night-work while the more fortunate painter, after the daylight had gone, went out to his haunts. But the painter lived under the recurrent threat of varnishing day. Time ran out, his ‘subject’ might be stolen. According to Whistler, as the fatal day approached ‘artists locked themselves into their studio – opened the door only on a chain – if they met each other in the street they barely spoke. Models went round silently with an air of mystery.’ The completed work departed in a cab, or, if the artist was poor, on foot, amid the laughter of the bystanders, to its fate before the Hanging Committee. Sales depended largely on Academy showings, and to a noticeable extent on Ruskin’s Academy Notes as soon as these began to appear in 1855. Engraving fees, if a picture was likely to ‘take’ as a popular print, were important: they had a great bearing on the choice of subject, and Frith at one time was offering £200 for good suggestions. Fame was reached when a picture was railed to keep back the crowd; respectability came with election as an Associate. It was a life of splendours and misères, but the English painter still felt his craft as honourable, hard-earned and necessary to society. Art was not yet fashionable, as it was to become in the seventies. The emphasis was not on beauty but on worth, and the painter was felt to be worthy. ‘[We artists] should cut a sorry figure if we laid down our brushes at any given hour,’ Holman Hunt wrote, ‘our lesson in art is the example it gives of strenuous effort.’
All this was of no interest to Burne-Jones. Like all living organisms, he anxiously searched his environment for what was hostile and what would be friendly to life; his instinct rejected the acceptable course of ‘doing things properly’.
It has been said that in his article on The Newcomes Burne-Jones had managed to praise Rossetti’s Maids of Elfenmere. This was an illustration to William Allingham’s Day and Night Songs, published by Routledge in 1855. It showed the three white-clad singing maidens hand in hand casting their spell over the half-unwilling lover. The Dalzeils, in the face of great difficulties (the design as handed to them was unreversed and in mixed pencil, wash, coloured chalk and ink), had reproduced it wonderfully well. Burne-Jones was struck by three things: the weirdness, the suggestion of music itself in the rhythm of the drawing, and the concentrated expression in the man’s face. The Memorials tells us that he returned to The Fairy Family with a new vision – one might say a new dissatisfaction, for although he made the figures larger he could not finish them. But the iron will-power which was so discerning in him now prompted him to drop the whole attempt, to disappoint his father and offend more people with his ‘notions’ and to appeal, somehow and in some way, to the man who had done Dante Drawing the Angel and now the Maids of Elfenmere.
Morris had written his difficult letter home, announcing his change of intentions, at the same time as Ned. He took his pass degree in the November of 1855, and in the following January signed his articles with the architect G.E. Street, whom they had met respectably at the Oxford Plainsong Society, and whose office was then in Beaumont Street. Morris seemed fairly and solidly started in his profession, among old friends. Ned, without much prospect of an honours or even a pass degree, set out for London after what must have been an awkward Christmas in Birmingham.
‘I was two and twenty, and had never met, or even seen, a painter in my life. I knew no one who had ever seen one, or had been in a studio, and of all men who lived on earth, the one I wanted to see was Rossetti.’
In saying that he had never even seen a painter Burne-Jones was less than grateful for the glimpses of Alfred Hunt in the print shop and for the efforts of his aunt, who had introduced him, as a schoolboy, to her brother-in-law