Edward Burne-Jones - Frances Spalding

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is difficult to tell at this distance of time why, in the summer of 1857, Rossetti suddenly decided to remove his followers from London to Oxford to decorate the new Debating Hall of the Union building. Rossetti, as a friend of the architect Benjamin Woodward, seems to have expected to get a definite commission for work on the Museum and may have been offered the Union in compensation. Certainly the Building Committee was induced to agree without waiting for a general meeting. The artists’ materials and board (this would only mean half-price vacation lodgings) were to be paid, but they were to give their work free. The inducing must have been done by Rossetti and Morris, who came to Oxford with him, for Woodward was a sick man, soon to be a dying one. It was, in any case, hard to get an opinion from his firm, since Woodward was completely silent, his partner Sir James Deane chattered and Deane’s son stammered.

      The commission was to undertake what was then called a fresco, but was actually painting direct on to the brick walls of the gallery. The gallery was pierced with twenty six-foil windows, the light from which would in any case make the surrounding decoration almost invisible. Rossetti also without consultation, decided on a series of scenes from the Morte d’Arthur. He thought he could manage two of them himself.

      This meant returning to London to recruit eight more artists. Madox Brown, the old professional who had been carefully trained in every branch of his art by Baron Wappers, stoutly refused to take part. Philip Webb and Street, who knew a good deal about mural painting, seem not to have been consulted. Morris and Ned of course would come, even though this meant Ned stopping work on his commission for Mr Plint. Arthur Hughes, who had worked for a time in Rossetti’s studio, came uncomplainingly. Spencer Stanhope was a well-off, well connected, unassuming young painter who had studied under Watts, and had had a studio directly underneath Rossetti’s in Chatham Place. He came, and so, rather against his mother’s better judgement, did young Val Prinsep. Staying as a guest with Woodward was a much more considerable figure, John Hungerford Pollen, who was now Professor of Fine Arts in the Catholic Univeristy of Dublin. It was he who had decorated the ceiling of Merton chapel, and he brought with him assistants, including Miss Smythe, model for the angels, and the support of the ‘artistic ladies’ who were beginning to make their appearance in North Oxford. Rossetti calculated that the work could be done in six weeks.

      This leads one to wonder how seriously the authorities took the idea in the first place. The ‘frescoes’ were to be done on whitewash and could always be whitewashed over again, as indeed Rossetti eventually suggested that they should be. When in the end it became clear that the project would never be finished, the committee had the last three bays finished without difficulty by William Rivière.

      Meanwhile Morris and Burne-Jones were sent on ahead, and took lodgings at 87 High Street. When Rossetti arrived they lived like a band of paint-stained, clay-smoking brothers, rejecting invitations to dinners and ‘evenings’, even on one occasion taking a train up to London and back to avoid them. It seems remarkable that they were asked out so often, until it is remembered that Stanhope and Prinsep were both very eligible young men.

      As to the work itself, Rossetti’s colour scheme of blues, reds and greens was undoubtedly a brilliant one, though it was blackened by the gas chandeliers within a year. The photographic reproductions edited by Holman Hunt in 19062 also show that Rossetti’s design of Lancelot’s Vision of the Sanc Grael was the only one of reasonable standard, but the plaster was not dry, and the small brushes he had ordered were quite inadequate. Perhaps because he realised this, Rossetti seems to have changed his mind and decided not to take the project seriously either. The stories of larks on the scaffolding and frightening quantities of soda water ordered in from the Star Hotel give an atmosphere of farce, but the younger painters were seriously trying to prove themselves. ‘Over the work the boy’s curls fell.’ Hunt, staying with the Combes, noticed Ned’s ‘personal manner of beseeching earnestness’, and Val Prinsep remembered him gliding in before the door was half open and sitting straight down to a pen-and-ink drawing. Morris, having made a mess of his painting, slaved away at the decoration of the roof, with the help of faithful Charlie Faulkner, now a Fellow of University College. Poor Arthur Hughes also worked seriously; he had even brought his dress clothes, and it is painful to hear of Gabriel giving orders that Morris should squeeze into the trousers ‘although Hughes was taller … and rather thin’. It was not only the stunning larks but the strain of working hard till the light failed and earning nothing that kept the atmosphere that summer at fever pitch.

      At the end of the long vacation there was no prospect of completion. Hungerford Pollen, who had at first unexpectedly joined in the chaff, coming round at eight in the morning to drag Ned out of bed, returned to Dublin leaving his assignment unfinished, although Miss Smythe had ‘put in’ the Brand Excalibur. Val Prinsep was recalled to London by Mrs Prinsep, who requested Ruskin to fetch him, saying he was learning nothing. Their places were taken, as the term began, by undergraduates who as Hunt acidly says ‘were induced to cover … certain spaces’. Among them was Swinburne, who had come up to Balliol the year before. In November Rossetti perhaps to his own relief, was called away; Elizabeth Siddal was seriously ill in London.

      Morris and Ned moved to new term-time lodgings at 13 George Street, and Ned, still wishing to prove himself, worked doggedly on at the Union. The subject Rossetti had set him was Nimuë Luring Merlin, and his design (in spite of Hunt’s compliments) was, for once, stiff and unsatisfactory – two figures of equal height facing each other across a wall. Spencer Stanhope (Sir Galahad and Three Damsels in the Forest of Arroy) laboured on by his side. ‘As time went on,’ he wrote, ‘I found myself more and more attracted to Ned … he appeared never to leave his picture as long as he thought he could improve it.’ But a string-course ran right through the heads of Nimuë and Merlin, and the brick-interrupted faces were a disaster.

      Morris’s feelings were quite different, because at the end of the long vacation he had met and fallen in love with Jane Burden, the seventeen-year-old daughter of an Oxford stableman. She had been admired in church, introduced by Mr Combe, and was the Guinevere of Rossetti’s design. A little drawing by Rossetti shows Morris diffidently offering her a large ring, over which she bends her dark head and her ‘neck like a tower’. Morris therefore stayed on in George Street for most of the following year, and in the February of 1858, Burne-Jones had to go back to Red Lion Square by himself.

      In appearance he was changed, because, like Morris, he had grown a short beard; the last glimpse of the clean-shaven Ned is the sleeping Lancelot in Rossetti’s Union mural, for which he sat as model. Emotionally, he was suffering a deep reverse after the excitement of the last year. Red Lion Square, it is clear, was never meant to be lived in alone; how little he was in touch with Morris was shown in a letter to Crom Price: ‘Is Topsy in Oxford?’ He painted on the Chaucerian cupboard, though still sickened by the smell of oils. He could not have helped reflecting on the good fortune of Topsy, who would be able to marry when he chose, whereas Ned’s engagement to Georgie had already lasted a year and a half and dragged on in aching unfulfilment. He was behind with Mr Plint’s commission, was worried by letters from home where Mr Jones was ‘in business trouble a good deal’, could not afford to visit the famous Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1875, and had not even the fare home to Birmingham.

      In the early summer of 1858 he fell seriously ill. This was the intensely hot year of the ‘great stink’, when the condition of the Thames sewage at last drove Parliament to legislate, and the combination of marsh fever, loneliness and frustration made Burne-Jones almost too weak to move.

      It is easy to dismiss the constant illnesses of Victorian letter-writers as self-induced, but if we do so we are put to shame by the ready anxiety of the sufferers’ friends. Cures were not expected; an illness at that time was a lifelong companion. Fainting, weakness and nightmares were part of Burne-Jones’s tensely-charged nature: Rossetti called them ‘Ned’s ups and downs’. In this acute ‘down’ he was rescued by the auntly and overwhelming Mrs Prinsep, who carried him off bodily to Little Holland House; her doctor tactfully told her that if she had not intervened it would have been too late.

      The rambling old place in Melbury Road was at the same time a refuge and a centre of eccentric yet stately hospitality. Holman Hunt felt that Mrs Prinsep, surrounded by her sisters, ‘could not but

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