The range and constancy of Burne-Jones^ humor may come as a surprise to those familiar only with his majes- tic, romantic paintings, as it did to Henry James when he reported in a letter to a friend that the artist "is (privately) a most delightful caricaturist and pencil satirist, little as you might suspect it." 1 This other persona was known only to fam- ily and intimate friends, who could still be startled by the swift change from seriousness to whimsy. Graham Robertson recalled that "as one gazed in reverence, the hieratic calm of the face would be broken by a smile so mischievous, so quaintly malign, as to unfrock the priest at once and transform the mage into the conjurer at a children's party ... it was like meet- ing the impish eyes of Puck beneath the cowl of a monk." 2 The lighter side of Burne-Jones s character had been evident from childhood, when he drew caricature portraits of the mas= ters at King Edward VI School, Birmingham, but was fully revealed only in Georgie s Memorials, published in 1904, which are sprinkled with examples of comic sketches. His habit of producing humorous drawings was encouraged in the compa- ny of Rossetti and the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites 3 and spread to his sketchbooks and the margins of serious work. "He was at it all the time," his studio assistant Matthew Webb remembered. "He loved to produce these amusing things, without end." On one occasion a fellow studio assistant "in hat and overcoat . . . [had] to stand for a drawing of the Rape of the Sabine Women, done with a few lines, for Burne-Jones had no great respect for realistically elaborated humorous draw- ings." 4 He could maintain great consistency in such things, however, and for many years delighted not only his own chil- dren but also those — chiefly the daughters — of his close friends with illustrated letters and stories featuring monsters, cats, and the chaotic world of the studio, "made ostensibly for the children," as Georgie remarked, "but really for the child that was always in himself." 5 Self-caricatures abound in Burne-Jones's letters, and were often used as a way to jolly himself out of a dark mood; many show him in comic despair, one of the funniest depicting a ser- vant cleaning the studio floor, with the artist holding his head in his hands. 6 Unpainted Masterpieces (cat. no. 169) reflects the feeling expressed to Charles Eliot Norton in 1880 that "my rooms are so full of work . . . [and] I have begun so much that if I live to be as old as the oldest inhabitant of Fulham I shall never complete it." 7 By the 1890s that feeling had grown into the genuine concern that "I don't feel that I have the time before me that I used to, and it won t do to put by anything I am about for fear I shouldn't have the chance of taking it up again." 8 The "fat lady" was a favorite symbol of the pomposity encountered during reluctant forays into society, 9 but the image also held a kind of grim fascination in its own right. In 1894 Burne-Jones went to the Westminster Aquarium to see Emma Frank, the American Tattooed Lady, who bore on her back a representation of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. She appears in illustrated letters to Violet Maxse (later Lady Milner) and was also drawn to amuse the Tuan Mada of Sarawak during his illness, along with a depiction of "Mrs. at Rottingdean on her honeymoon . . . [with] no indication of virginal contours." 10 For balance, he also drew an unflattering likeness of two Japanese sumo wrestlers seen at the Olympia exhibition hall. 11 William Morris was the inevitable butt of many of Burne- Jones's caricatures, just as he had been for Rossetti. His increasing girth occasioned a typical practical joke in his early years, as when Burne-Jones and Charles Faulkner surrepti- tiously narrowed his waistcoat by restitching the lining, 12 and the portly mature Morris appears in many amusing drawings: two collections formerly belonging to the Ionides family include depictions of him riding, climbing, executing hand- stands, and playing Ping-Pong/ 3 There are variants of the famous image of Morris reading aloud to Burne-Jones (cat. no. 172; another is in the British Museum) 14 that complement Georgie's shamefaced confession to "often falling asleep to the steady rhythm of the reading voice, [and] biting my fingers and stabbing myself with pins in order to keep awake" during the author's recitations from The Earthly Paradise^ The present lively record of Morris weaving was made during a demon- stration at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in November 1888. 1. Letter to Elizabeth Boott, December n, 1883, in Henry James: Letters, edited by Leon Edel, vol. 3, 1883-18% (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 18. For a discussion of Burne-Jones s humorous drawings, see Lambourne 1975. Several important groups of works have appeared in the salesroom: Sotheby's Belgraviajune 20, 1972, lots 66-73; Sotheby's Belgraviajune 29, 1976, lots 210-250; Sotheby's Belgravia, March 23, 1981, lots 27-40; Christie's, October 16, 1981, lots 40-46; and Sotheby's, January 31, 1990, lots 33i — 343. 2. Robertson 1931, p. 76. 3. See Stephen Wildman, "Three Pre-Raphaelite 'cadavres exquis,' " in Re- framing the Pre~Raphaelites, edited by Ellen Harding (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 253-60. 4. Webb 1908-9, pp. 422-23. 5. The best of these, written to Katie Lewis (fig. 103), were published in 1925 as Letters to Katie. A book of drawings made for his granddaugh- ter Angela was sold at Sotheby's, November 3, 1993, lots 202-217. 6. In a letter to a member of the Gaskell family; Sotheby's Belgravia, March 23, 1981, lot 32. 7. Memorials, vol. 2, p. 107. 8. Ibid., p. 305. 9. A splendid watercolor sketch of a stuffy dinner party was sold at Sotheby's Belgravia, June 29, 1976, lot 249; a related drawing, The type of man Burne-Jones couldnt stand, was sold at Sotheby's Belgravia, December 6, 1977, lot 70. Another depiction, Two fat ladies" conversing is in the British Museum {Letters to Katie 1988, fig. 1). 10. H. H. The Dayang Muda of Sarawak, Relations and Complications (London, 1929), p. 98. The Rottingdean sketch was sold at Sotheby's Belgravia, June 29, 1976, lot 248, along with two of the Emma Frank drawings (lot 246); the Maxse letters appeared at Sotheby's (Books), July 19, 1989, lot 404. Another drawing of Miss Frank appears on the verso of a study for the Kelmscott Chaucer, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (reproduced in Lambourne 1975, fig. 8). 11. Sotheby's Belgravia, June 29, 1976, lot 245. 12. J. Comyns Carr, Coasting Bohemia (London, 1914), pp. 86—87. 13. Sotheby's Belgravia, June 29, 1976, lots 2ioff., and Christie's, June 7, 1996, lot 557. 14. Also exhibited in Victoria and Albert Museum 1996, no. A15. 15. Memorials, vol. 2, p. 297.