Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet, ([1] 28 August 1833 – 17 June 1898) was an English painter and designer associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's style and subject matter.[2]
Burne-Jones worked with William Morris as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co in the design of decorative arts. His early paintings show the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but by 1870 he had developed his own style. In 1877, he exhibited eight oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery, a new rival to the Royal Academy of Arts. These included The Beguiling of Merlin. The timing was right and he was taken up as a herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement.
In the studio of Morris and Co. Burne-Jones worked as a designer of a wide range of crafts including ceramic tiles, jewellery, tapestries, and mosaics. Among his most significant and lasting designs are those for stained glass windows the production of which was a revived craft during the 19th century. His designs are still to be found in churches across the UK, with examples in the US and Australia.
Early life
Born Edward Coley Burne Jones (the hyphenation of his last names was introduced later) was born in Birmingham, the son of a Welshman, Edward Richard Jones, a frame-maker at Bennetts Hill, where a blue plaque commemorates the painter's childhood. A pub on the site of the house is called the Briar Rose in honour of Burne-Jones' work.[3] His mother Elizabeth Jones (née Coley) died within six days of his birth, and Edward was raised by his father, and the family housekeeper, Ann Sampson, an obsessively affectionate but humourless, and unintellectual local girl. He attended Birmingham's King Edward VI grammar school in 1844 and the Birmingham School of Art from 1848 to 1852, before studying theology at Exeter College, Oxford.[4] At Oxford, he became a friend of William Morris as a consequence of a mutual interest in poetry. The two Exeter undergraduates, together with a group of Jones' friends from Birmingham known as the Birmingham Set, formed a society, which they called "The Brotherhood". The members of the brotherhood read the works of John Ruskin and Tennyson, visited churches, and idealised aspects of the aesthetics and social structure of the Middle Ages.[3] At this time, Burne-Jones discovered Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur which would become a substantial influential in his life. At that time, neither Burne-Jones nor Morris knew
Burne-Jones had intended to become a church minister, but under Rossetti's influence both he and Morris decided to become artists, and Burne-Jones left college before taking a degree to pursue a career in art. In February 1857, Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott:
Marriage and family
In 1856 Burne-Jones became engaged to Georgiana "Georgie" MacDonald (1840–1920), one of the MacDonald sisters. She was training to be a painter, and was the sister of Burne-Jones's old school friend. The couple married on 9 June 1860, after which she made her own work in woodcuts, and became a close friend of George Eliot. (Another MacDonald sister married the artist Sir Edward Poynter, a further sister married the ironmaster Alfred Baldwin and was the mother of the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and yet another sister was the mother of Rudyard Kipling. Kipling and Baldwin were thus Burne-Jones's nephews by marriage).
Georgiana gave birth to a son, Philip, in 1861. In the winter of 1864, she became gravely ill with scarlet fever and gave birth to a second son, Christopher, who died soon thereafter. The family then moved to 41 Kensington Square, and their daughter Margaret was born there in 1866.
In 1867 Burne-Jones and his family settled at the Grange, an 18th-century house set in a garden in North End, Fulham, London. For the 1870s Burne-Jones did not exhibit, following a number of bitterly hostile attacks in the press, and a passionate affair (described as the "emotional climax of his life") with his Greek model Maria Zambaco, which ended with her trying to commit suicide by throwing herself into Regent's Canal.
During these difficult years, Georgiana developed a friendship with Morris, whose wife Jane had fallen in love with Rossetti. Morris and Georgie may have been in love, but if he asked her to leave her husband, she refused.
Artistic career
Early years: Rossetti and Morris
Burne-Jones once admitted that after leaving Oxford he "found himself at five-and-twenty what he ought to have been at fifteen". He had had no regular training as a draughtsman and lacked the confidence of science. But his extraordinary faculty of invention as a designer was already ripening; his mind, rich in knowledge of classical story and medieval romance, teemed with pictorial subjects, and he set himself to complete his set of skills by resolute labour, witnessed by his drawings. The works of this first period are all more or less tinged by the influence of Rossetti; but they are already differentiated from the elder master's style by their more facile though less intensely felt elaboration of imaginative detail. Many are pen-and-ink drawings on vellum, exquisitely finished, of which his Waxen Image (1856) is one of the earliest and best examples. Although the subject, medium and manner derive from Rossetti's inspiration, it is not the hand of a pupil merely, but of a potential master. This was recognised by Rossetti himself, who before long avowed that he had nothing more to teach him.[7]
Burne-Jones's first sketch in oils dates from this same year, 1856, and during 1857 he made for Bradfield College the first of what was to be an immense series of cartoons for stained glass. In 1858 he decorated a cabinet with the Prioress's Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, his first direct illustration of the work of a poet whom he especially loved and who inspired him with endless subjects. Thus early, therefore, we see the artist busy in all the various fields in which he was to labour.
Honours
In 1881 Burne-Jones received an honorary degree from Oxford, and was made an Honorary Fellow in 1882.[5] In 1885 he became the president of the Birmingham Society of Artists. At about that time, he began hyphenating his name, merely—as he wrote later—to avoid "annihilation" in the mass of Joneses. In November 1893, he was approached to see if he would accept a Baronetcy on the recommendation of the outgoing Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, the following February he legally changed his name to Burne-Jones. He was formally created a baronet of Rottingdean, in the county of Sussex, and of the Grange, in the parish of Fulham, in the county of London, in the baronetage of the United Kingdom on 3 May 1894,[14] but remained unhappy about accepting the honour, which disgusted his socialist friend Morris and was scorned by his equally socialist wife Georgiana. Only his son Philip, who mixed with the set of the Prince of Wales and would inherit the title, truly wanted it. Burne-Jones was made an elected member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium in 1897.[15]
Following Burne-Jones' death, and at the intervention of the Prince of Wales, his memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey
Influence
Burne-Jones exerted a considerable influence on French painting. He was influential among French symbolist painters, from 1889.[16] His work inspired poetry by Algernon Charles Swinburne – Swinburne's 1866 Poems & Ballads is dedicated to Burne-Jones.
Three of Burne-Jones's studio assistants, John Melhuish Strudwick, T. M. Rooke and Charles Fairfax Murray, went on to successful painting careers. Murray later became an important collector and respected art dealer. Between 1903 and 1907 he sold a great many works by Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, at far below their market worth. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery now has the largest collection of works by Burne-Jones in the world, including the massive watercolour Star of Bethlehem, commissioned for the Gallery in 1897. The paintings are believed by some to have influenced the young J. R. R. Tolkien, then growing up in Birmingham.[17]
Burne-Jones was also a very strong influence on the Birmingham Group of artists, from the 1890s onwards.
Neglect and rediscovery
On 16 June 1933, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, a nephew of Burne-Jones, officially opened the centenary exhibition featuring Burne-Jones's drawings and paintings at the Tate Gallery in London. In his opening speech at the exhibition, Baldwin expressed what the art of Burne-Jones stood for:
But, in fact, long before 1933, Burne-Jones had fallen out of fashion in the art world, much of which soon preferred the major trends in Modern art, and the exhibit marking the 100th anniversary of his birth was a sad affair, poorly attended. It was not until the mid-1970s that his work began to be re-assessed and once again acclaimed, following the publication of Martin Harrison and Bill Waters' 1973 monograph and reappraisal 'Burne-Jones'. In 1975, author Penelope Fitzgerald published a biography of Burne-Jones, her first book. A major exhibit in 1989 at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (in book form as: John Christian, The Last Romantics, 1989), traced Burne-Jones's influence on the subsequent generation of artists, and another at Tate Britain in 1997 explored the links between British Aestheticism and Symbolism.[16]
A second, lavish centenary exhibit – this time marking the 100th anniversary of Burne-Jones's death – was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1998, before travelling to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Fiona MacCarthy, in a review of Burne-Jones's legacy, notes that he was "a painter who, while quintessentially Victorian, leads us forward to the psychological and sexual introspection of the early twentieth century".
Gallery
Stained and painted glass
Drawings
Paintings
Early works
Decorative arts
Theatre
Photographs
See also
- List of paintings by Edward Burne-Jones
- The Flower Book
- Stained Glass Designs for the Vinland House, 1881
External links
- Online Burne-Jones Catalogue Raisonné
- Profile on Royal Academy of Arts Collections
- The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860–1910 Online version of exhibit at the Tate Britain 16 October 1997 – 4 January 1998, with 100 works by Burne-Jones, at Art Magick
- Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery's Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource Large online collection of the works of Edward Burne Jones
- Lady Lever Art Gallery
- Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon'' (1881) in the Museo de Arte de Ponce
- Pre-Raphaelite online resource project website
References
- "Burne-Jones". Collins English Dictionary.^
- Carlos A. Lehnebach, Claire Regnault, Rebecca Rice, Isaac Te Awa, Rachel A. Yates. Flora: Celebrating our Botanical World Te Papa Press, 2023-11-01^
- Ruth Millington. Edward Burne-Jones and The Legend of the Briar Rose