The Michaelmas (fall) term was, not surprisingly, unsettled as he pondered how to put his resolve into practice, but in January 1856 he contrived to meet Rossetti (fig. 50) in London. His path was smoothed since Rossetti had already read a grat- ifying reference to his work that Burne-Jones had inserted into a review of Thackeray's novel The Newcomes (1853-55) which he had written for the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. The great man invited him to visit his studio, romantically overlooking the Thames in Chatham Place, Blackfriars, and in May, having given up all thought of taking a degree, Burne- Jones settled in London to begin his career as an artist under his hero's supervision. The previous January Morris had arti- cled himself to the leading Gothic Revival architect, George Edmund Street (1824-1881). Street's practice was then in Oxford, but he moved his office to London in August 1856. Rossetti gave his disciple some informal lessons, and for about three years Burne-Jones attended evening life classes at the art school run by James Matthews Leigh (1808-1860), a former pupil of Etty, in Newman Street, Bloomsbury. This, apart from his early spell at the Birmingham School of Design, was the only formal artistic training he received. Having learned "nothing at all" at Leigh's, he wrote, "I went home and made a school of practice for myself out of the stud- ies for my designs." 3 Sickert, for one, approved. In an article entitled "The Teaching of Art and Development of the Artist," published in 1912, he held Burne-Jones up as an "admirable example" (Turner and Charles Keene were others) of an artist who had learned his trade "on the job" rather than wasting years "in a vacuum ... of abstract study." 4 Perhaps so powerful a personality would always have escaped the undue professionalism from which many Victorian artists suffered, but Burne-Jones's lack of training can only have helped him to retain the freshness of vision and unconventional approach to technique which are essential aspects of his creativity. There is a sense in which he was always an amateur, and all the better for it. From being awed outsiders, Morris and Burne-Jones were suddenly at the heart of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. In January 1856 Burne-Jones began to correspond with Ruskin ("I'm not E. C. B. Jones now, . . . my future title is 'the man who wrote to Ruskin and got an answer by return "), 5 and the friends finally met him the following November, paying an ecstatic visit to Denmark Hill when Ruskin returned after several months abroad. They also met Ford Madox Brown, the father figure of the movement with whom they were soon on intimate terms, as well as Millais, Hunt, Arthur Hughes (1832-1915), and everyone else in this closely knit but rapidly expanding community. Founded in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had now passed through its earliest and most revolutionary stage, when its pictures had caused shock and outrage. Largely because of Ruskin's advocacy, it had won many adherents, and by the mid-i85os the walls of the Royal Academy, the very institution that the Brothers had set out to subvert, were peppered with pictures showing the movement's influence. To this extent Burne-Jones and Morris, who had abandoned Street's office by the end of 1856 and was now, at Rossetti’s insistence, struggling to become a painter as well, were part of a much wider phenomenon. Burne-Jones also found himself absorbed into the orbit of George Frederic Watts (1817-1904; fig. 51), the genius-in-residence at Little Holland House in Kensington, where the indefatigable Sara Prinsep, wife of a wealthy Anglo-Indian civil servant and sis- ter of the equally formidable Julia Margaret Cameron, the famous photographer, presided over a salon packed with celebrities from the worlds of art, literature, politics, and sci- ence. Ruskin, Rossetti, and other Pre-Raphaelites were among Mrs. Prinsep s "lions." Within this galaxy of interlocking circles, Rossetti, Morris, and Burne-Jones formed a closely knit bohemian clique passionately devoted to a cult of the Middle Ages. A man of immense charisma and magnetism, Rossetti had been the driving force behind the original PRB, and he was now to launch a second wave of the movement with the assistance of his two acolytes. Conditioned by Carlyle to look for heroes, the friends had already found a whole series — Charles Kingsley, Tennyson, Ruskin, and Carlyle himself. None had quite answered to their innermost needs, but Rossetti unques- tionably did so in both artistic and personal terms. Their encounter with him was the perfect climax to their early aspi- rations, and once again, as with their discovery of each other, one can only marvel at their luck. For Burne-Jones in partic- ular Rossetti would be a vital source of inspiration for every- thing that followed. To the end of his life he would ask himself whether Rossetti would "approve" of his work "and be pleased with it, or whether he'd say it was rubbish." 6 In retrospect 1856, the "annus mirabilis" of his wife's biography, seemed "a year in which ... it never rained nor clouded, but was blue summer from Christmas to Christmas," when "London streets glittered, and . . . the air [was] sweet and full of bells." 7 But it must not be thought that this was a one-way rela- tionship, Rossetti being in every sense the giver, Burne-Jones and Morris the passive receivers. On the contrary, the power and energy released by their union were the result of a pool- ing of resources. Burne-Jones and Morris, who were, after all, only five and six years younger than their master, brought to the encounter minds that were richly endowed and perhaps, given their superior formal education, more disciplined. Already ardent and knowledgeable devotees of everything medieval by the time they left Oxford, they as much as Rossetti were responsible for the intense medievalism which characterizes the work of their circle in the late 1850s. Hitherto, Rossetti's imagination had been dominated by Dante. Suddenly he switched his allegiance to Malory, declar- ing that the M or te d* Arthur and the Bible were "the two great- est books in the world," 8 and there is little doubt that he was introduced to, or at least made more aware of Malory's book by his disciples. Similarly, with their knowledge of illuminat- ed manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, they seem to have encouraged Rossetti's tendency to base his watercolour style on medieval miniatures. 9 In human terms, too, Rossetti bene- fited. If he provided the friends with the ideal hero, they gave him what he needed almost as urgently: admiration, intellec- tual companionship, scope for his formidable powers of lead- ership, and a welcome relief from the nagging anxiety of his long and tangled relationship with Elizabeth (Lizzie) Siddal (1834-1862). Burne-Jones would later refuse to allow anything into the canon of his work prior to 1856. The chief casualties of this rule were the remarkable designs for Maclaren's Fairy Family (cat. nos. 1-3). Rediscovered and published only in recent years, they are a fascinating record of his development during this crucial period, the majority being done before he met Rossetti but a few clearly showing that artist's influence. The first work Burne-Jones would acknowledge was The Waxen Image, a pen-and-ink drawing of 1856 on the theme of witch- craft, based on Rossetti's poem "Sister Helen." Unfortunately, though we have a detailed description, the drawing itself was destroyed in the Second World War and no photograph seems to survive. Equally elusive in its way is his contribution to the murals illustrating Malory that Rossetti and a team of assistants — including Morris, Hughes, and two pupils of Watts, Val Prinsep (1838-1904) and J. R. Spencer Stanhope (1829-1908) — painted on the walls of the newly built Oxford Union Society in 1857 (fig. 52). The episode is one of the most famous in Pre-Raphaelite annals, partly because the work was carried out in exuberant high spirits, all the more frenzied for the presence of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909; fig. 78), who, as an undergraduate at Balliol, joined the circle at this date. It was also, incidentally, the moment when Burne-Jones, taking advantage of his relative isolation, grew a beard, an ornament he retained, at one length or another, for life. But the paintings themselves, executed in the most ama- teur fashion with only the minimum of preparation, soon faded to mere shadows. Modern lighting has given them a lit- tle more substance, but they remain essentially wrecks. A more tangible expression of Burne-Jones s intentions is provided by a group of small pen-and-ink drawings dating from 1857-61, a continuation of the series started by The Waxen Image and all, as the American educator and author Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908) said of that drawing, "in the extreme Pre-Raphaelite manner, exquisitely over-elaborated [and] of infinite detail." 10 Early in his career Rossetti had experienced great difficulty with painting in oils, and throughout the 1850s he preferred to work in pen and ink or watercolour. Burne-Jones's addiction to pen and ink was an extension of this trend, although his drawings also owe much, both technically and iconographically, to the engravings by Diirer and other early German masters which were popular in his circle at this time. We know that in 1856 his rooms were "hung with brasses of old knights and drawings [sic] of Albert Diirer." 11 These probably belonged to Morris, although Ruskin also was an important source; he was a keen collector of Diirer s prints, which he used extensively in his work as a teacher of drawing. Another enthusiast was the painter William Bell Scott (1811-1890), and in fact it was to him, in February 1857, tna * Rossetti described Burne-Jones's drawings as "marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequalled by anything unless perhaps Albert Diirer s finest works." 12 First comes a group of medieval subjects which bear close comparison both with the watercolours that Rossetti was cur- rently painting with what he called "chivalric Froissartian themes" 13 and with Morris's first volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere, published in March 1858 (cat. nos. 5, 6). The triangular relationship is emphasized by the fact that Morris, who at this stage had considerable private means, owned or commissioned most of Rossetti's "Froissartian" watercolours and one of Burne-Jones's best drawings in the same idiom, The Knights Farewell (cat. no. 5). The next draw- ings are more varied. They include a beautiful rendering of the parable of the ten virgins (cat. no. 8) but also that extraordi- nary performance Buondelmontes Wedding (cat. no. 7), an account of a famous incident in Italian history in which the artist takes quaintness, intensity, and horror vacui to the brink of nightmare. The series ends with a drawing inspired by Robert Brownings well-known poem "Childe Roland" (1855; cat. no. 14). Browning was enormously admired in Pre-Raphaelite circles at this date, and Burne-Jones had met him by July 1856. Although Burne-Jones liked to tell doleful tales of his early life in London (disgusting meals in cheap restaurants; a friend of his mother who lectured him on extravagance when he asked for a £2 loan), the backing of Rossetti and Ruskin, both of whom had the highest regard for his talent, saved him from the worst hardships of a struggling young artist. He might find it "difficult to live," he wrote in 1858, but he was "thought a most successful beginner, and . . . spoken of in London a great deal." 14 Following in Rossetti's footsteps, he seems to have made no attempt to exhibit at either the Royal Academy or the British Institution, but he showed with other members of the circle at the semiprivate Hogarth Club, which was launched in April 1858 and had premises centrally situated in the Piccadilly area. In fact, he played a leading part in its foun- dation and was on the committee. Nor were the patrons who were already buying from more established Pre-Raphaelites slow to acquire his work. Nearly all were typical of the new breed of middle-class collector to whom the movement appealed so much — the Leeds stockbroker Thomas E. Plint, the Newcastle industrialist James Leathart, the Liverpool tobacco merchant John Miller. It is some indication of his success that in January 1859, only three years after he had arrived in London with no artistic cre- dentials, he began to teach drawing at the Working Mens College, the pioneering venture in working-class education that Ruskin, Rossetti, and Madox Brown also supported. He remained on the staff until March 1861, first helping Brown and then taking a class of his own. Much of the respect he commanded was due to his skill as a decorative artist, espe- cially in the field of stained glass. His very first essay in this field, the design of the Good Shepherd, which was to remind Sir John Pope-Hennessy of the models in Harrods' window, drove Ruskin "wild with joy" when he saw it. 15 As early as 1857, on Rossetti's recommendation, he was working for two of the most progressive stained-glass firms of the day, James Powell and Sons and Lavers and Barraud, and although the latter employed him only once (perhaps because he managed to upset the architect William Butterfield), he was soon design- ing Powell's most important windows, including those at Christ Church, Oxford, and Waltham Abbey. In April 18 61 Morris, at last finding his true metier as a visual artist, launched his famous firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., "Fine Art Workmen," with Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Brown, and Philip Webb (his fellow trainee in Street's office) all among the founding partners. From then on Burne-Jones s skills as a decorative artist were almost entirely monopolized by Morris, for whom he was soon decorating furniture and designing tiles and needlework as well as stained glass. The last remained his forte. All three of the firms that had employed him showed his work in this medium at the International Exhibition held at South Kensington in 1862. During his early years in London Burne-Jones lived at a series of addresses in Bloomsbury, an area long established as London's bohemian quarter. In August 1856, when Morris moved with Street to London, the friends shared rooms in Upper Gordon Street, and the following November they took a first-floor apartment at 17 Red Lion Square, which had once been tenanted by Rossetti and the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite painter Walter Deverell. But in 1859 this bachelor world was breached when Morris married Jane Burden (1839-1914), the daughter of an Oxford groom and a young woman of uncon- ventional beauty whom he had met while working at the Oxford Union. He also commissioned Webb to design a house for him in the country. The result was the famous Red House at Upton in Kent (fig. 53), a plain (by Victorian stan- dards) red-brick building set amid apple orchards and a gar- den designed to resemble the hortus conclusus of a late-medieval illuminated manuscript. The decoration of this idyllic retreat, to which Burne-Jones contributed a series of murals (cat. no. 11), was the prelude to the founding of the firm in 1861. Meanwhile, in the summer of i860 both Rossetti and Burne-Jones also married, Rossetti to Lizzie Siddal, the neu- rotic and perpetually ailing redhead to whom he had been so long engaged, Burne-Jones to Georgiana Macdonald (1840- 1920; fig. 54), the twenty-year-old daughter of a Methodist minister whom he had known since the early 1850s, when her father was stationed in Birmingham. Georgie was one of a remarkable galaxy of sisters who would eventually link Burne- Jones, the classical painter Edward Poynter (1836 — 1919), and two great men of the next generation, Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, by ties of marriage. Unlike Jane Morris and Lizzie Rossetti, she did not possess great beauty. Small, with a simple, neat elegance, she reminded Charles Eliot Norton of "a Stothard Grace," 16 especially when she sang and played the piano, which she did extremely well. What she lacked in appearance, however, was amply made up for in strength of character and an unswerving moral rectitude which could make even the strongest quail. The marriage was far from being without its problems. Burne-Jones placed it under enormous strain by his affair with the Greek beauty Maria Zambaco (cat. no. 49) in the late 1860s, and Georgie s relentless high-mindedness could get on his nerves, especially in later life when it took a socialistic turn under the influence of Morris. Graham Robertson believed that Burne-Jones’s addiction to Rabelaisian caricatures was a reaction against his surroundings, which were "so extremely correct and proper.'" 17 But there was never any danger of the marriage collapsing. The couple retained a deep fund of mutual affection, and no doubt Burne-Jones knew only too well how much he depended on Georgie. Not only did she run their household with great efficiency but she acted as his personal assistant, writing many of his letters, relieving him of all busi- ness worries, and zealously protecting him from intruders. Lady Frances Balfour (cat. no. 108) described her as "the guardian of B-J s time, and a very inexorable one," adding that she found her "rather daunting." 18 When Burne-Jones boast- ed, as he often did, of being what today would be called a workaholic, he was paying an unspoken tribute to Georgie, without whose support he would never have been able to spend the long hours in his studio that enabled him to be so prolific. After his death she rendered him the final service of compiling one of the best of the memorial biographies that were accorded to nearly every major Victorian artist. By about i860 watercolour was replacing pen and ink as Burne-Jones's primary technique, this again reflecting the practice of Rossetti. During the early 1860s he painted a dis- tinct group of works in this medium, still small in scale by comparison with the later work. The well-known Sidonia von Bork and Clara von Bork (cat. nos. 12, 13) are among the earli- est examples, and the series culminates with The Merciful Knight, of 1863 (cat. no. 26), which to Georgie seemed "to sum up and seal the ten years that had passed since Edward first went to Oxford." 19 Thematically these pictures represent many of the circle s literary enthusiasms at this period: Malory (cat. no. 15), Chaucer, border ballads (fig. 56), the fairy tales of Grimm and Perrault (cat. no. 22), Wilhelm Meinhold's grue- some gothic horror story Sidonia the Sorceress. Painted with a good deal of bodycolour and a considerable amount of ox gall, they have a density and richness diametrically opposed to the translucency normally associated with watercolour. Their deep and glowing tones parallel the schemes of rich polychromy and constructional colour favored by the Gothic Revival archi- tects with whom his talents as a decorative artist brought him into contact: Benjamin Woodward, William Butterfield, G. E. Street, William Burges, J. P. Seddon, G. F. Bodley, Philip Webb, William White. Indeed, he had already begun the practice of occasionally developing a stained-glass cartoon as a watercolour, using the design s sepia outlines as a mono- chrome underpainting. But this close relationship between painting and design, which remained constant throughout his career despite outward changes of style, was only sympto- matic of a fundamental cast of vision, a natural tendency to opt for a decorative effect and to prefer mood and fairy-tale fantasy to drama and psychological insight. This is the great difference between Burne-Jones and Rossetti, for whom the latter qualities were paramount, certainly at this early period. Burne-Jones, wrote Ruskin in 1859, is "the most wonderful of all the Pre-Raphaelites in redundance of delicate and pathet- ic fancy — inferior to Rossetti in depth — but beyond him in grace and sweetness." 20 1. Memorials, vol. 1, p. 115. 2. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 168, 333. 3. Ibid., p. 294. 4. Osbert Sitwell, ed., A Free House! Or, The Artist as Craftsman: The Writings of Walter Richard Sickert (London, 1947), p. 311. 5. Memorials, vol. 1, p. 127. 6. Ibid., p. 149. 7. Ibid., p. 151. 8. Oswald Doughty,^ Victorian Romantic: L> ante Gabriel Rossetti, 2d ed. (London, i960), p. 207. 9. See Julian Treuherz, "The Pre-Raphaelite and Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts," in Pre-Raphaelite Papers, edited by Leslie Parris (London, 1984), pp. 153-69. 10. Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe, eds., Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (London, 1913), vol. 1, p. 342. 11. Mackail (1899) 1950, p. no. 12. Rossetti, Letters, vol. 1 (1965), p. 319. For further information on the influence of Diirer, see John Christian, "Early German Sources for Pre-Raphaelite Designs,"^/ Quarterly 36 (spring-summer 1973), pp. 56-83. 13. Rossetti, Letters, vol. 1 (1965), p. 336. 14. Memorials, vol. 1, p. 185. 15. Vallance 1900, p. 2. 16. Norton and Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, vol. 1, p. 344. 17. Robertson, Letters, p. 491. 18. Lady Frances Balfour, Ne Obliviscaris (London, 1930), vol. 1, pp. 229, 237. 19. Memorials, vol. 1, p. 262. 20. Van Akin Burd, ed., The Winnington Letters: John Raskins Correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall (London, 1969), p. 150.
