Two autograph letters signed (“E Burne Jones”), to the poet and critic Cosmo Monkhouse, lamenting the ways of restorers: “for miserable wretches have got hold of my picture of ‘Love Amongst the Ruins’ which was painted in water colour -- & have treated it as an oil painting & varnished it with white of egg to make it shine for their hellish reproductions, & I suppose washed the mess off again with warm water & there is no more that picture in the world – if it matters – at least it is a piece of my life lopped off me – a child murdered – many another hateful image to be made of it – I am and have been sick with a sort of despair at the uselessness of striving. I want other men warned – I want it to be widely known what tricks these wretches play with pictures entrusted to them” and in the next letter informing him that “I am trying to make a record of ‘Love in the Ruins’ with an angry heart – for I haven’t much time left for such waste”; with two letters from Scribner’s to Monkhouse (see below), Burne Jones’s letters 7 pages, light dust-staining, 8vo, the Grange, undated [late 1893 and/or early 1894] 'SHINE LIKE FOR OF THEIR HELLISH REPRODUCTIONS': BURNE JONES ON THE DESTRUCTION OF A MASTERPIECE: its ruination at the hand of printers notwithstanding, Love Amongst the Ruins has become one of Burne Jones's best-known pictures, thanks to the oil reconstruction of 1894 now at Wightwick Manor (National Trust), which was published as an etching in 1899. This is the "record" made "with an angry heart" referred to in the second of his letters. Burne Jones's letters can be dated from two by Edward Livermore Burlingame of the New York publishers Scribner's to Monkhouse, dated 9 November 1893 and 24 March 1894. The first sends Monkhouse proofs of the plates illustrating his article 'Edward Burne-Jones', which was to appear in the February 1894 issue of Scribner's Magazine, requiring immediate approval. The second congratulates Monkhouse on the published article and commissions a follow-up on G.F. Watts (published that December). In the first of his undated letters, Burne Jones writes: "I have just come back, to find your letter -- & its most agreeable enclosure from Scribner's – I return it at once". Bonhams 2013
... White of egg poured over it - / that it may glisten for their / most -d and -d / photography / now write and propose a time / next week when you can / come and we will talk / soothingly of things / always yours sincerely / E Burne-Jones