Edward Burne-Jones - Frances Spalding

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can have been one of the few periods in Burne-Jones’s life when he was not reading Ruskin, since he had given every copy he possessed to Georgie as a betrothal present. Meanwhile, Georgie and Morris drew together only slowly, but Ned of course still had his permitted outings with his sweetheart – now referred to as ‘my stunner’, although, as Norton noticed, she looked not Pre-Raphaelite, but exactly like a Stothard print. One outing where pennilessness did not matter was to the National Gallery, which, though it was still hemmed in with washhouses and barracks, had started its career as a representative collection. Under Sir Charles Eastlake it now had an annual purchasing grant of £10,000 and a clear mandate to buy early German and Italian pictures, for the ‘primitive rooms’, with Ruskin to advise on how to protect them against London soot.

      Here Burne-Jones studied the Van Eyck Marriage of Arnolfini (acquired in 1842). The year before his death he told Georgie that his whole life long he had hoped to do something as rich and deep in colour as the Arnolfini, and now it was too late. ‘It’s all very well to say it’s a purple dress – very dark brown is more like it.’ The extreme depths of the blacks, the corresponding whites with no pure white in them, the strange room, the tender marriage symbolism, the orange, the famous mirror (which Holman Hunt had already copied in The Lost Child) continued to haunt him. In 1858 the gallery also possessed Botticelli’s Virgin and Child, the Three Maries from the Lombardo-Baldi collection, and three Perugino panels, one of which, the St Michael, has a waisted suit of fantastic armour, like birds’ wings or fishes’ scales; this is the dream armour which Burne-Jones already preferred to careful historical reconstructions. To go forward a little, in 1860 the gallery acquired the Filippo Lippi Annunciation which Ned studied in hopeless admiration at its use of gold, and Fra Angelico’s Christ Glorified in the Courts of Heaven, surely the origin of Morris’s remark that the heads in a picture should be ‘all in a row, like shillings’. In 1862 came the Piero di Cosimo Mythological Subject (then called the Death of Procris). In front of these pictures the shadow of the young Burne-Jones, in his soft hat, must still hover, as it does in the tapestry courts ‘like little chapels’ of what was then the South Kensington Museum. No amount of travel abroad could give him the familiar love which he had for these treasures when he had scarcely a shilling in his pocket.

      The book which expressed what Ned could hardly put in words about these pictures was Rio’s Poetry of Christian Art, translated in 1845 because of what the introduction calls ‘the daily increasing taste and appreciation of early Italian art’. This, of course, was a sign of the times. Christian Art, in fact, is the heroine of the book, brought to life by Giotto, humbly served by Fra Angelico, cruelly betrayed by the Medici, who favoured profane poetry and banking houses, rescued by Savonarola, betrayed again by the ‘defection’ of Raphael; in Venice she was in her glory with Carpaccio, and Rio speaks of visitors ‘whose looks and gestures showed that the picture of St Ursula sleeping had put them into an ecstasy’, but once again she was betrayed by Squarcione, rescued just in time by Gentile Bellini, and destroyed by the paganism of the seventeenth century. Aesthetic considerations are not Rio’s concern. Botticelli is little mentioned; Ruskin’s (and Proust’s) favourites, the blonde-haired Daughters of Jethro in the Vatican, are criticised because they draw attention away from Moses. But Rio has presented the history of Italian art as an adventure worthy of Sintram. This was the book which Ned put aside to give to Georgie on their wedding day.

      This was a year when the air seemed ‘sweet and full of bells’ to Burne-Jones, and although Morris, in a letter of 1875, recalls these as the ‘tin-pot bells of St Pancras’, he also calls them ‘well-remembered days, when all adventure was ahead’. Later still, in 1893, Burne-Jones wrote to Mrs Helen Gaskell that he was alone in London and;

      it was a little like it was when I first came to London and hadn’t a friend … I wandered alone the streets looking in pawn-brokers’ shops, and went over all the streets I used to know, I even dined at the same place where I first dined with Gabriel the first time I was admitted to that heavenly company and I thought and thought and thought.22

      So sure an instinct has the human heart for its happiest time.

       5 1856–60

       THE LONG ENGAGEMENT

      There is a mild irritation in Rossetti’s letter to Allingham on 16 December 1856: ‘Jones is doing designs (after doing the ingenuous and the abject for so long) which quite put one to shame, so full they are of everything.’ But there is also his characteristic generosity, and he threw himself into finding some way for Ned to make a living. His method of doing this was to praise his protégé to the skies as ‘unrivalled by any man I know’, to produce examples from his capacious pockets, and to approach even his own not too numerous patrons; these had come to know him and made their own deductions. The Illustrated London News not surprisingly turned down the idea of the quite inexperienced young Jones working for them as a draughtsman. Gabriel next approached James Powell and Son, the glass manufacturers. According to May Morris, he told them that a ‘young chap called Jones would do them some good stuff’. For this firm Burne-Jones produced his first cartoon for a window.

      This cartoon, The Good Shepherd, is a strong apprentice’s design in Rossetti’s manner, a broad-hatted Christ with nail-holes in large square hands, ‘in such a dress as is fit for walking the fields and hills’, carrying a sheep which chews the vine-leaves round his hat. Although it drove Ruskin ‘wild with joy’ it seems not to have been used until 1861, when it was carried out for the congregational church in King Street, Maidstone. But Powell’s commissioned more work, the Adam and Eve, Tower of Babel and Solomon and Sheba for St Andrew’s College, Bradfield, a window for Waltham Abbey and, at the suggestion of the architect Woodward, the St Frideswide window for Christ Church, Oxford. This (although Malcolm Bell tells us that Burne-Jones was thrown out by being supplied with the wrong measurements) is truly the ‘stained glass of a stunner’ as he described it to Swinburne, who was writing the ‘labels’ – a dazzling mass of jewel colour, strikingly different from his St Cecilia of 1874 on the opposite side of the chancel. In these first designs, he indicated the lead lines and the colouring himself.

      Two points may be made about the beginning of his thirty years’ career as a great designer of windows. First, it was absolutely necessary to the life that Morris and he had mapped out for themselves that their art should be, as far as possible, public. ‘Portable art is ignoble art,’ says Ruskin in The Two Paths, and none of Browning’s Men and Women affected Burne-Jones more than the Pictor Ignotus who shrinks from the private patron:

      These buy and sell our pictures, take and give

      Count them for garniture and household stuff,

      And where they live must needs our pictures live …

      The beauty of art should be for as many people as possible to stand in front of; it should ‘show people things’. Secondly, his earliest attempts made it clear that Burne-Jones was born with the gift of filling spaces. This natural gift of design he estimated calmly, knowing it was necessary but wanting to learn other things, and never confusing it with Chiaro’s struggle to paint the soul. This is well shown by his attitude to Japanese art, which he tried to explain to the earnestly collecting William Michael Rossetti. ‘Japanese art is well placed and no more; but the making of patterns is no trifle – it’s a rare gift to be able to do it.’1

      With easel painting he went ahead much more slowly, and here, whatever the Pictor Ignotus might say, private patrons must be found, and without exhibitions, since Rossetti hated them. Apart from Ruskin and Mrs Street, who bought The Waxen Image, Burne-Jones’s first patron was T.E. Plint, a kindly and (as it turned out) not very businesslike Leeds businessman. He had the habit of paying artists in advance for their work, which Rossetti regarded as a mere stockbroker’s device in the hope of rising values; but in fact Plint meant kindly, and understood what it was to be tinless. For him Ned began on two water-colour

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