Burne-Jones's love of drawing encompassed a thorough knowledge of Old Master techniques, bolstered by his ownership of a useful library of books and photographs, many obtained for him by Charles Fairfax Murray. His own experi- ments included the practice of metalpoint on prepared grounds (cat. no. 110), some of which were colored, as in the two - figure study for The Golden Stairs, formerly in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, and now in a private collec- tion in Canada, which also has highlights in white bodycolor. 1 He was beginning to use gold paint on dark backgrounds on a regular basis as early as 1890, when he made up for exhibiting no oil paintings at the New Gallery by submitting some spec- tacular works on paper, including the six gouache studies for the Briar Rose series, now at Birmingham (cat. no. 58), and four "Designs in Gold," one of them on a red ground. The female musician (cat. no. 165) is very close to the fifth figure, identified as Playing (who comes between Feasting and Sleeping), in the painting The Hours (1882), now in the Sheffield City Art Galleries. Such a resemblance is typical of the recurrence in later work of previously successful motifs, as much subconscious as deliberate. Some drawings in this medi- um seem to have been versions of favorite subjects, such as Cupids Hunting Ground and Caritas (Charity) shown at the Burlington Fine Arts Club Memorial Exhibition of 1899, 2 but many others are head studies done for what F. G. Stephens called the pure "rapture of colour-expression." 3 Both Fantasy (cat. no. 166) and the present Head of a Woman are good exam- ples, the latter formerly belonging to his close friend from 1892, Mrs. Helen Mary GaskelL While making one such drawing on April 22, 1897, ne inadvertently smudged it, then told Rooke; "This gold work must be done very directly — it's an art of itself. I forget how I do it between one time and another, and it's always an experiment." 4 Saint Michael the Archangel (cat. no. 164) is one of the most elaborate of these works, and comes closest to re-creating the type of early medieval book art that had always greatly impressed on the artist. In one of his letters of this period to Frances Horner, daughter of his patron William Graham, he mentions seeing a Byzantine book of Gospels in Quaritchs bookshop, with "every sheet dipped in a vat of Tyrian purple dye. There are five -and- twenty tints of Tyrian purple. When you dipped the first time a pale rose colour came and when you dipped the twenty-fifth time it was the colour of a black poppy." 5 The figure of Saint Michael is adapted from a design of 1886 for stained glass formerly in the English Church of Saint George in Berlin, 6 which itself derives from one of the archangels in the Heavenly Jerusalem mosaic of 1880-85 f° r tne American Church in Rome. The inscription on the 1896 draw- ing identifies it as a gift from Edward and Georgiana Burne- Jones to Laura Epps, the second wife of the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema and a considerable artist in her own right, who exhibited both at the Grosvenor and at the New Gallery. The two families developed a close friendship beginning in the early 1880s, Burne-Jones and Alma-Tadema often dining together at Previtali's restaurant. 7 A letter from Burne-Jones formerly accompanying the drawing announced: "Here is a little gold sort-of-thing which I have made o' purpose for you. ... I only wish it was prettier, and that the gold would shine more, but if you will accept it as coming from loving and lasting friends, its purpose will be accomplished." 8 1. Art Gallery of Ontario 1993-94, no. A38. 2. Burlington Fine Arts Club 1899, nos. 146, 149; Caritas is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. 3. Athenaeum, February 4, 1899, p. 152. 4. Lago 1981," p. 143. 5. Horner 1933, p. 139. 6. The cartoon for Saint Michael, along with three other subjects for the Berlin window, was sold out of the collection of the Ruskin Galleries, Bembridge, at Sotheby's, April 26, 1990, lot 54. 7. J. Comyns Carr, Coasting Bohemia (London, 1914), p. 31. 8. Quoted in Art Gallery of Ontario 1993-94, p. 61.
The elaborate and decorated monogram indicates that this drawing was likely to have been given by the artist to a friend. The drawing is a re-working of an mid-1870s head study of Frances Horner (nee Graham) made for The Golden Stairs. This is one of a number of re-workings made in the 1890s when Burne-Jones was remembering happier days.
Cecil French was born in Dublin and trained as an artist at the Royal Academy Schools, London, and at Sir Hubert von Herkomer's School at Bushey, Hertfordshire. On 30 June 1953 the Fulham Public Libraries Committee accepted with thanks Cecil French's offer of six works by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, for display in the libraries. French's offer was a response to the Council's positive attempts to preserve The Grange, Burne-Jones's house in North End Lane which sadly, after French's death, came to nothing. In his will, dated 19 January 1952, French instructed one of his executors, Rowland Alston, Curator of The Watts Gallery, Compton, to distribute the remainder of his paintings, following specific bequests, to museums. Thus, in February 1954, Fulham received a bequest of a further 47 works (both paintings and drawings), the majority of which were by Burne-Jones.