Patrick Bade - Edward Burne-Jones

Text: Patrick Bade

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ISBN : 978-1-78160-638-4

Edward

Burne-Jones

1. King Cophetua and the
Beggar Maid, 1880-1884.

Oil on canvas, 290 x 136 cm.

Tate Britain, London.

When Burne-Jones mural sized canvas of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (p. 4) was exhibited in the shadow of the newly constructed Eiffel Tower at the Paris Exposition universelle in 1889, it caused a sensation scarcely less extraordinary than the tower itself. Burne-Jones was awarded not only a gold medal at the exhibition but also the cross of the Lgion dhonneur. He became one of those rare Anglo-Saxons who, from Constable in the early nineteenth century to Jerry Lewis in the late twentieth century, have been taken into the hearts of the French intelligentsia. For a few years while the Burne-Jones craze lasted, fashionable French women dressed and comported themselves la Burne-Jones, cultivating pale complexions, bruised eyes and an air of unhealthy exhaustion. The two great French Symbolist painters Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes immediately recognised Burne-Jones as an artistic fellow traveller. In 1892, the cheer leader of the Decadence Sr Josphin Pladan, announced that Burne-Jones would be exhibiting at his newly launched Symbolist Salon de la Rose-Croix alongside Puvis de Chavannes and other leading French Symbolist and English Pre-Raphaelites.

Burne-Jones wrote to his fellow artist George Frederick Watts I dont know about the Salon of the Rose-Cross a funny high-fallutin sort of pamphlet has reached me a letter asking me to exhibit there, but I feel suspicious of it. Like Puvis de Chavannes (who went so far as to write to Le Figaro denying any connection with the new Salon), Burne-Jones turned down the invitation.

It is very unlikely that Burne-Jones would have accepted, or perhaps even have understood, the label of Symbolist. Yet, to our eyes, he seems to have been one of the most representative figures of the Symbolist movement and of that pervasive mood termed fin de sicle.

Symbolism was a late-nineteenth-century reaction to the positivist philosophy that had dominated the mid-century. It found expression in the gross materiality of the paintings of Courbet and Manet and the realist novels of Emile Zola and in Impressionism with its emphasis on sensory perception. Above all, it was a reaction against the belief in progress and modernity represented by the Eiffel Tower itself and against the triumph of industry and commerce celebrated in the vast Hall of Machines in the same exhibition, which had filled Puvis de Chavannes with horror and had given him nightmares.

2 .The Annunciation ( The Flower of God), 1863.

Watercolour and gouache, 61 x 53.3 cm.

Collection Lord Lloyd-Webber.

3. Sidonia von Bork, 1860.

Watercolour and gouache,

33 x 17 cm. Tate Britain, London.

Burne-Jones entire lifes work can be understood as an attempt to create in paint a world of perfect beauty, as unlike the Birmingham of his youth as possible. When Burne-Jones was born in Birmingham in 1831, it was known as the workshop of the world. Before the exemplary reforms of Mayor Joseph Chamberlain in the late nineteenth century, Birmingham was a byword for the dire effects of unregulated capitalism a booming, industrial conglomeration of unimaginable ugliness and squalor. The sense of anxiety and alienation that pervades much of Burne-Jones work and that, despite his yearning for the distant past makes him seem so modern, goes back to his earliest childhood experiences. Like Munch, he could have claimed that sickness and death were the dark angels watching over his cradle.

His mother died within days of his birth and, though his father was later affectionate and caring, he could not at first bring himself to touch or even look at the child who reminded him of his grief. Burne-Jones (or simply Ned Jones, as he was known at this period of his life) grew up a sickly child. According to his wife Georgiana (Georgie), constitutional weakness must take its place as one of the understood influences of his life. She tells us how later in life he might be found quietly fainting on a sofa in a room where he had been left alone. This weakness was as much psychological as physical. According to Georgie, with him, as with sensitive natures, body and mind acted and reacted on each other. He could never rid himself of apprehension in life and was at times worn out by the struggle to meet and endure troubles that never came as well as those that did. Even more than his elaborately wrought paintings, Burne-Jones humorous drawings, made for the amusement of his friends, reveal the terrors of his inner life with startling frankness.

4. Going to the Battle, 1858.

Grey pen and ink drawing on

vellum paper, 22.5 x 19.5 cm.

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

5. Clara von Bork, 1860.

Watercolour and gouache,

34 x 18 cm. Tate Britain, London.

6. Cinderella, 1863.

Watercolour and gouache on paper

mounted on canvas, 67 x 31.5 cm.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

7. Saint George and the Dragon:
The Petition to the King, 1865-1866.

Oil on canvas, 106.7 x 183 cm.

Hanover College, Hanover (Indiana).

He shows himself as a hollow cheeked and skeletal neurasthenic, akin to Munchs alter ego in The Scream and in comical contrast to the earthy robustness of his life-long friend, William Morris. A particularly telling series of drawings shows him, as he put it, attempting to join the world of art by climbing into one of his own paintings and coming out the other side with a bump of disillusion. On the surface, Burne-Jones private life would seem to have been that of an exemplary Victorian husband and pater familias. He met his future wife Georgiana MacDonald, the sister of a school friend and the daughter of a Methodist minister, when he was nineteen and she was twelve. Despite their humble and impoverished circumstances, the MacDonalds were clearly a very remarkable family.