The Perseus Series Although he had made only limited progress toward the completion of Cupid and Psyche (cat. nos. 40a- 1), and had begun serious work on only two of the major elements of the Story of Troy (cat. no. 50), Burne-Jones could not resist the temptation to take on another cycle of paintings in 1875. In the spring of that year the rising young Conservative politi- cian Arthur Balfour (1848 -1930) was taken by Lady Airlie to visit Burne-Joness studio, where he "at once fell a prey both to the man and his art." 1 In his memoirs Balfour (who was to serve as Prime Minister from 1902 to 1906) described hav- ing bought a house at 4 Carlton Gardens in 1871: "It so hap- pens that the principal drawing-room was, as London drawing-rooms go, long and well lit, and the happy thought occurred to me to ask my new friend to design for it a series of pictures characteristic of his art. . . . The subject I left entirely to him. The choice of the Perseus Legend was there- fore not mine, but I have never regretted it." 2 Again Burne-Jones turned to Morris's Earthly Paradise for a poetic narrative of the legend, under the title "The Doom of King Acrisius." He also went to the British Museum library, looking particularly at treatments of the subject on Greek Attic vase painting; in a letter to his young son, Philip, he reported that he had been "looking up all the most ancient ways of pourtraying [sic] Medusa, and they are few but very interesting, and I know much more about it than I did," 3 He quickly devised a sequence of ten subjects, mapped out in three large designs, showing their disposition around the walls, with decorative borders of Morris s acanthus wallpa- per pattern. Four of the subjects, including those above the chimneypiece and doors, he intended to have executed as gesso panels carved in relief and painted. 4 As always when his imagination was newly fired, much preparatory work was begun, including a host of studies from the male and female nude, many dating from 1875 and 1877; one sketchbook dated July 1875 is largely filled with studies for the series. 5 Full-scale cartoons in watercolour and bodycolour (cat. nos. 88-97) were begun in 1877 and completed in 1885, but only four of the designs were painted in oils; these are all now in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, along with two further unfin- ished canvases and two duplicate cartoons. Of the finished oils, The Baleful Head was shown as one of the artist's last exhibits at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1887, and two others {The Rock of Doom and The Doom Fulfilled) were exhibited at the New Gallery in 1888; Perseus and the Graiae, completed only in 1892, was sent to the Paris Salon in 1893. Critical reaction to the work was mixed, most commentators finding Burne-Jones s treatment of the legend rather dispassionate, although effective in its own terms: the art critic of the Times noticed perceptively how "action itself is conveyed in a strangely individual way; it is not so much action as the spir- it of action." 6 The reviewer for the Art Journal lamented a lack of human interest, and saw no attempt by the artist "to strike people by making them feel how the thing really took place; but he has woven luxurious, elaborate, and precious workmanship into a scheme of decorative import." 7 F. G. Stephens, writing in the Athenaeum, agreed that "literal vraisemblance does not exist for our painter, who has devised, so to say, his own nature, and represents it in his own way, and for him it is sufficient that it is self-consistent and pro- foundly beautiful, and romantic in the noblest sense of that much abused term." 8 Balfour was happy to receive what still provided a mean- ingful sequence of works, and was praised by Philip Burne- Jones for never trying "in any way to hasten him in a matter which he understood did not admit of haste, and my father fully realised and appreciated his considerate conduct." 9 The cartoons now at Southampton, which give an unusually complete idea of Burne-Joness method of working out a detailed and complicated narrative, were framed and dis- played in the artist s garden studio, where they were univer- sally admired for their extraordinary vigor and dramatic power; Graham Robertson was not alone in his view that they "far sur- passed any of them that ever reached completion." 10 1. Arthur James, 1st Earl of Balfour, Chapters of Autobiography (London, 1930), p. 233. 2. Ibid. 3. Memorials, vol. 2, p. 58. 4. Tate Gallery, London (3456-3458), reproduced in Locher 1973, figs. 19-21. 5. See ibid, for a very full account of the relationship of the many studies to each element of the series. 6. Times (London), May 9, 1888. 7. Art Journal, July 1888, p. 221. 8. Athenaeum, May 19, 1888, p. 635. 9. Burne-Jones 1900, p. 162. 10. Robertson 1931, p. 76.
It was originally intended that there should be ten paintings; they had been commissioned by Arthur Balfour for the music room of his London house, and Burne-Jones produced a set of elaborate designs showing how the framed paintings would be integrated into the interior, including the chimneypiece and door, and how their wider setting would extend to a ground of scrolling acanthus (either of stucco or wallpaper), to be provided by Morris & Co. Sadly, this scheme was never completed, and the finished paintings in Stuttgart were framed at some point in the Venetian ‘swan’s head’ pattern. In the designs, above, however, the fully coloured paintings were to be framed in gilded and fluted mouldings – very similar in profile to the frames on the gouache cartoons for the Perseus Cycle now in Southampton (see below), but completely gilded, rather than black and parcel-gilt. The low-relief gilded and silvered images in gesso on oak panels [34], which fitted over the door and chimneypiece and in the centre of the third wall, were to have had completely plain, flat borders. Both types of frame were evidently designed to provide a resting place between the paintings and the acanthus background. It is not clear when the Stuttgart pictures were given the Renaissance-style ‘swan’s head’ frames, but presumably their pierced, scrolling pattern was a replacement for the acanthus walls in the failed commission. The Frame Blog