Together they [Burne-Jones and William Morris] returned to those books about which they were enthusiastic as young men - Malory's Morte d'Arthur and Chaucer ''' one result was ... The Quest for the Holy Grail tapestries. Morris and Company had received a commission from the Australian mining millionaire, W. K. D'Arcy, to furnish his house, Stanmore Hall, near Uxbridge. It had a large dining room and Morris persuaded him to make use of a tapestry to cover the walls. On undertaking to decorate the walls in this way, Morris asked Burne-Jones to draw cartoons for a series based on the Holy Grail legend. The set consisted of five large panels, a smaller one of a ship, and a dado of verdure with knights' shields hanging from the trees. The five scenes were as follows: The Knights of the Round Table summoned to the quest by a strange damsel, The Arming and Departure of the Knights, The Failure of Sir Lancelot, The Failure of Sir Gawaine, The Achievement of Sir Galahad Accompanied by Sir Bors and Sir Percival. The tapestries took a number of years to execute; the first was completed in 1894. Trees once again are used as a means of conveying the peculiarly intense atmosphere, especially in the Failure of Sir Lancelot, where they create a sense of magic unreality. The design of this scene, it is interesting to note, is very similar to Rossetti's version in th Oxford series murals of 1857, although in reverse, and Burne-Jones must have found it more interesting than the others, as he converted this design into a painting of 1896. The finished painting can be seen in Southampton Art Gallery. In Malory's version of the Arthurian Romances, Sit Lancelot is the first of the knights of the Round Table, and in the quest he has glimpses of the Holy grail, but no more, being hindered by his sins.
The drawing is a large (but not full scale) composition study for a painting that Burne-Jones exhibited at the new Gallery in 1896, tow years before his death (fig 1). Sir Lancelot, the noblest and bravest of King Arthur's knights, has come to the chapel of the Holy Grail, which the fellowship of the Round Table has been summoned to find, or "achieve"; but in a dream the angle who guards the vessel tells hi that he will never succeed because of his adultery with Queen Guinevere. Only to his stainless son Galahad will this supreme mystical experience be vouchsafed. The painting is an easel version of the fourth subject in the set of tapestries illustrating the Quest of the Holy Grail that Burne-Jones designed for William Morris in 1890-91. The tapestries were commissioned by William Knox D'Arcy, a wealthy Australian oil and mining magnate, to hang round his dining-room at Stanmore Hall, near Uxbridge in Middlesex, which the Morris firm was currently decorating. The scheme is represented here, (fig 2) by one of the subjects, The Failure of Sir Gawain and Sir Ewain, that was sold in these Rooms last June and is iconographically comparable to the Lancelot scene. The set as a whole not only marks the climax of the collaboration between Morris and Burne-Jones in his field but is one of the supreme achievements of the Arts and Crafts movement. Like many artists at the end of their lives, Burne-Jones tended to return to first principles in the 1890s. He had outgrown his long love affair with Italian art, reverting to a more "gothic" style in which the forms, far from having their former Botticellian grace and sinuosity, are aggressively angular and jagged. As for imagery he tended to return to Chaucer and Malory, the two authors who had so captures his and morri's imagination when they were undergraduates at Oxford in the 1850s. The Morte d'Arthur particularly presented a vehicle for an old man's vision of withdrawal into a world of mystical reality, and he found many opportunities to indulge his regenerate feeling for the great romance. They included The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (Museuo de Arte, Ponce, Puerto Rico), the enormous canvas he had embarked on for George Howard, Earl of Carlisle, but later reclaimed when it turned into a major personal statement; the sets and costumes for J. Comyns Carr's play King Arthur, stage by Henry Irving a the Lyceum Theatre in January 1895; and the illustrations for The High History of the Holy Graal, a translation of a French prose romance of the Grail by his friend Sebastian Evans (1898). But the Holy Grail tapestries were the principal expression of his revived commitment to the legend, and he was probably largely responsible for suggesting their theme, seeing the commission as an unmissable chance to treat it on a heroic scale. Certainly the subject was proposed to D'Arcy by Morris after "careful discussion" with Burne-Jones, and Morris advocated the Grail story on the grounds that it composed itself so naturally into "a series of pictures". Burne-Jones had always had a tendency to base his easel paintings on designs he had originally evolved for some decorative purpose, so it is no surprise that the Holy Grail tapestries spawned easel versions. The final scene, in which Sir Galahad attains the Grail, watched from a distance by Sir Bors and Sir Percival, was adapted as a much smaller watercolour (Arts Council's Burne-Jones Exhibition 1975-6, no 230), while the failure of Lancelot, represented here by a compositional study (fig 3) was re-interpreted on the more substantial scale of the oil painting now at Southamption (fig1). The two version are very different . While the tapestry is conceived in terms of the relatively bright colours that characterise the whole series , the painting displays what Stephen Wildman calls a "sombre austerity suiting the artist's later temperament." this "austerity" is equally typical of our drawing which Wildman sees as the principal means by which "the compositional alterations to the tapestry design" were worked out. These alterations focus on the "background, which is expanded into a dark and desolate clearing. Lancelot's shield, also given a more subdued armorial, hangs on a withered tree, symbolizing the failure of his ambitions, and in place of John Henry Dearle's plethora of plants and flowers, Burne-Jones has left only briars at the chapel gate. The angle has been made more ethereal, and her profile catches more of the light that shines out onto the figure of the sleeping knight." Burne-Jones had great trouble with this figure; his assistant T. M. Rooke recorded him working on it on 18 January 1896 and complaining that it was "very hard to get right". Not surprisingly, two pairs of drawings survive, in each case showing the figure both nude and draped. The pair in the Bradford Art Gallery (fig 4) could conceivable have been made for the tapestry rather than the painting, but the other pair, in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, were undoubtedly done in preparation for the painting, corresponding in such important respects as the position of the knight's head,legs and sword. Toronto drawings are illustrated in The Earthly Paradise, the catalogue of an exhibition of arts and crafts by William Morris and his circle in Canadian collections mounted by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1993, p.74, no. A:25 a-b. Since the solution for the figure of Lancelot worked out in the Toronto drawings is also common to our version, it seems that they pre-date it and that our drawings falls between them and the painting. But there are also signs that the artist continued to revise the composition after our drawing had been executed. In the painting the withered tree is smaller, and Lancelot's relationship to the well-head against whi9ch he leans is somewhat different. The angel's head has also been re-drawn, although in both treatments the contrast with the figure in the tapestry is striking. Whereas in the tapestry the angel actively prohibits the knight's entrance and seems to rebuke him for his sins, in the paintings and our drawing she appears to take pity on his plight, a much subtler and more mature conception. The briars which as Wildman observes, replace the luxuriant flowers designed for the tapestry by Morris's assistant J. H. Dearle, are an echo of the famous Briar Rose paintings (Buscot Park, Oxfordshire), the exhibition of which in 1890 had effectively marked the climax of Burne-Jones career. Wildman also points out that a plaster model of a house which was used for several of the Holy Grail tapestry designs, including the one adapted here, is seen under the table in a photograph of Burne-Jones's studio; see Julia Cartwright, "The Life and Work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart", Art Annual, Christmas 1894, p.31. Lady Burne-Jones redcalled in her Memorials that The Dream of Lancelot was one of her husband's "favourites" among his paintings. Indeed the fact that it was the only one of the tapestry designs to be re-cast as a painting on a substantial scale suggests that it had some special significance for him. it is possible that, as Douglas Schoenherr wrote in the Earthly Paradise catalogue, the picture "may allude obliquely to the painter's adulterous relationship with Maria Zambaco", although perhaps it would be truer to say that it symbolized for him a profound truth about the human condition of which his own aberration was but one example. Whatever the case, the importance of the design for Burne-Jones seems to go back to the time, nearly forty years earlier, when he had joined his revered master D.G. Rossetti and other youthful enthusiasts to paint murals illustrating the Morte d'Arthur in the oxford Union. Rossetti had chosen the same subject for his contribution to the scheme, and Burne-Jones had posed for the figure of Lancelot dreaming that his way was barred by the figure Guinevere herself standing with her arms extended in an apple tree. it was typical of Rossetti to introduce such a symbolic touch, evoking appropriate thoughts of the Fall of Man, and Burne-Jones did not attempt to revive this explicit interpretation. Nonetheless his return to the subject in the last years of his life was a particularly graphic demonstration of his loyalty to old sources of inspiration and desire to bring his career full circle. The drawing's first recorded owner was the great picture collector Francis Thomas de Grey, seventh Earl Cowper (1834-1906). It must have hung at his London House, 4 St James's Square, or at one of his country seats, Panshanger in Hertfordshire or Wrest Park in Bedfordshire. We know little of Burne-Jones's relations with the Cowpers, but Lady Cowper was painted by his brother-in-law Edward Poynter in the 1870s. The drawing descended to Lady Cowper on the Earl's death in 1906, and when she died seven years later was inherited by her niece Lady Desborough, who was left both Panshanger and the house in St James's Square. Lady Desborough had been brought up by the Cowpers.having been orphaned at the age of five. She had married William Grenfell, later Baron Desborough, in 187, and her parties at her country house, Taplow Court near Henley, were legendary. She was one of the hostesses at the heart of the social set known as the Souls, and although she had no interest in the visual arts she owned more than one work by Burne-Jones, the artist of whom this group was so enamoured (see also lot 10). Following Lady Desborough's death in 1952, the drawing was sold anonymously at Christie's for the paltry sum of 8 guineas, a graphic illustration of how Burne-Jones's reputation was still in the doldrums,. Revival would have to wait another ten years. Christie's 2004