LITMIR.BIZ

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women offer Tennyson, Browning and Thackeray cups of tea almost kneeling’. Those early days seem to have been a perpetual summer: strawberries came from a Kensington farm, children romped on the lawn, Tennyson read aloud under the trees; Julia Cameron had not yet begun to menace all-comers with her camera, and inside there was quiet in the shadowy rooms, where Watts’s canvases glowed on the walls. Watts had his quarters upstairs in another ‘quaint set of rooms’ (for which, incidentally, he paid rent), and the huge Val Prinsep, who had carried Ned up the ladders when they were both at work at the Union, now carried him up to bed.

      The most telling part of the experience of Burne-Jones was not so much Mrs Prinsep’s kindness, for nearly every woman he met wanted to look after him, but the day-to-day living in a house where nothing was ugly, nothing was saved up to be used again, and beauty was taken for granted. He was, also, in contact with a highly skilled artist, for although Watts was largely self-trained, he had been working since the age of ten and was amiably accustomed to pupils.

      It was here, Burne-Jones said, that he learned that ‘painting is really a trade; the preparation and tools are so important’.³ Watts was at work on the sumptuous Countess Somers, almost life-size, in Venetian rose and ochre and his favourite indigo. Although Watts did not let his pupils copy, the portrait was a lesson in itself on the handling of colour. Meanwhile the real Lady Somers accompanied her sister, Mrs Prinsep, on a call on Georgie; it was a visit of inspection, during which the minister’s family was not daunted.

      Little Holland House, however, could be a dangerous place. We have a description by Ruskin in the Winnington Letters of Ned’s second visit the following spring, with Watts in the drawing-room painting, apparently, in an arm-chair. The atmosphere was one of charged sensibility, with Tennyson shaking like the ‘jarred string of a harp’ as he complained about the recent Moxon edition, illustrated by Rossetti, Millais and Hunt, among others, while Ruskin defended the artist’s right to interpretation. ‘… Behind me, Jones … laughing sweetly at the faults of his school as Tennyson declared them, and glancing at me with half wet half sparkling eyes.’ A day or two later he gives a truly Ruskinian classification of Ned’s smile (as opposed to Watts’s, which seems to have been fairly normal); it is ‘like a piece of sugar candy – he is white and fair … all done in light – the lips hardly smiling at all.’ One’s reaction to this is that Ned must be got out of Little Holland House as soon as possible, and in fact both Rossetti and Morris began to think so. Gabriel believed that the air of Kensington was unhealthy. In an affectionate letter, beginning ‘Dear dear old Ned’,⁴ his advice is to leave the Prinseps, put the Blessed Damozel aside and start ‘one or two small things’ to sell at once; Plint is used to long delays in any case.

      In September, when Ned emerged from Little Holland House, he found that Morris did not want to return to Red Lion Square at all. While on holiday, rowing down the Seine with Webb and Faulkner, he had worked out plans to build his own house; in fact he had already bought a piece of land at Upton in Kent. Ned perambulated the streets again, and found rooms in what is now Fitzroy Street, but was then 24 Russell Place. So unobtrusively did he go that even Red Lion Mary was not sure of the date.⁵

      His evenings were sometimes spent at the Hogarth Club, one of the very numerous exhibiting, talking, smoking and mutual-help groups of the gregarious Victorian artist. Madox Brown and Rossetti were on the committee, and Spencer Stanhope and George Boyce were among the members. Boyce’s diaries record a meeting at Red Lion Square, but the club had now moved to 6 Waterloo Place, Burne-Jones, at least, had hoped for a quiet ‘mag’ there in the evenings, but was appalled by the meetings, resolutions and regulations which seemed inseparable from it. He began to realise that he was not a man for public life. The Hogarth, however, was of importance to the forward young spirits at the Academy schools, who were allowed to look in and saw there pictures which were exhibited nowhere else.

      It is rather a surprise to find that Burne-Jones, who had had so little instruction himself, had now begun teaching at the Working Men’s College. Ruskin was still attending there, having abolished the too-popular modelling classes (from which ‘men appeared smudged with white clay’), in favour of more serious drawing. Ned (who appears in the records as Edward Burne Jones, Exeter College, Oxford, Painter, giving him a dignity he hardly possessed) acted at first as assistant to Madox Brown; later he had his own drawing class, the Figure and Animals, on Mondays and Fridays. One must hope that he was never called upon to do horses, which always worried him; though his sketches in the Victoria and Albert suggest he had very poor models, probably cab horses. But Ned was an excellent teacher. From his first lessons with Louie Macdonald to the very night he died he continued to help and encourage beginners.

      Once again, it is a drawing by Rossetti which gives us Ned’s appearance at the time, with his first beard and sad, very light eyes. This is a study for the head of Jesus in Rossetti’s Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, for which the dazzling actress Louisa Herbert had been persuaded to sit. The Magdalene’s figure, however, with its brawny arms, was taken from a Scandinavian prostitute of the tough, good-natured type – according to G.A. Sala, the original Jenny. ‘The Magdalene was taken from a strapping Scandinavian,’ Burne-Jones told Rooke. ‘She was a splendid woman, beyond doubt … she always used to call me Herr Jesus quite seriously, not knowing my name – which pleased him exceedingly.’⁶

      The courtesy of this scene is a reminder that Burne-Jones in these early days did try to act upon the pity for women which is evident in The Cousins. He brought home an ‘unfortunate’ to Red Lion Square for Mary to feed and clothe – it is to Mary’s credit that she didn’t object to this – and a little later we have a glimpse of him rescuing a drunken woman from a small crowd of onlookers and taking her to safety.

      ‘1859 March 6 Sunday,’ Boyce wrote in his diary, ‘Crowe Faulkner Jones and self rowed to Godstow to see “stunner”, the future Mrs W. Morris. On return all dined at Topsy’s including Swinburne: Morris and Swinburne mad and deafening with excitement.’ Ned was at Oxford to see about Powell’s commission for the Christ Church window; a few weeks later he met Boyce on a quieter occasion, escorting him and his sister to see the illuminated manuscript of the Roman de la Rose in the British Museum. On the 26 April he was back in Oxford for Morris’s wedding. Georgie and her sisters came down with him, Dixon, now a curate, performed the ceremony, but this could not have eased the feeling of separation as Morris and Janey set off for their wedding journey. Worse still, The Revd George Macdonald had been appointed to the Manchester circuit, and in September Georgie left London with her family.

      At this desolate moment Val Prinsep and Charlie Faulkner suggested a tour of Italy. Presumably Ned had been paid by Powell & Co. for his window designs, so he could afford to go. ‘Dear little Carrots,’ he wrote to Swinburne, who was still supposed to be writing labels for the Frideswide, ‘the saving grace is that I am soon to see Florence for the first time.’

      ‘My dear Browning,’ Rossetti wrote on 21 September, ‘you know my friend Edward Jones very well; only being modest, he insists you do not know him well enough to warrant his calling on you in Florence.’ It was a pity, after the kindheartedness of this, that the party in fact missed the Brownings and only came across them for a short time in the cathedral in Siena. They travelled in four weeks through Paris, Marseilles, Genoa, Livorno, Pisa, Florence, Venice, Milan and back by rail through the Mont Cenis pass. Ned spoke no Italian and, so he declared, only one word of French – ‘oui’; this according to Ruskin, was an advantage, as speaking the language leads to the ‘enviable misadventures’ which are so tedious to hear about afterwards. These misadventures, perhaps because Prinsep, who had studied at Gleyre’s, spoke French so well, certainly took place: after Faulkner left they came home penniless, having had nothing but coffee and a roll for two days and having crossed the Channel in the worst storm of the year.

      Ned, who was ill nearly all the way, and every time they got into a railway carriage, must have been something of a nuisance, but Prinsep saw that he was suffering from something more than ‘Ravenna fever’: the overwhelming impact of the Brera, the Uffizi, the Pitti and the Accademia and, still more, the sight of Italian painting at home in its own cities. He had made a number of copies from Old Master paintings – ‘working

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