15. Then this second cartoon, 1 also from the Legend of Good Women, 2 is of the two wives of Jason Hypsipyle and Medea ; and I want you to note in it again the special gift of the painter in seizing the good, and disdaining evil. For in the legend of Medea as we usually read it and think of it a common painter would have discerned only a cruel and enraged sorceress. But Medea is more than a Sorceress. 3 Her name means Counsellor, Designer as the name of Jason means the healer ; she is, in fact, the Pallas or Minerva of the lower phases of human art, and her terror is that of Wisdom forsaken or despised, corresponding to the snake-fringed aegis of Pallas herself. Again Hypsipyle is the type of the patience and protective gentleness of the affections she having saved her father from the rage of the Lemnian women 4 and the painter has therefore endeavoured to express together these two ideals of gentleness and wisdom, but the last, in the power of it and the authority, dark and inexorable. 1 [Burne-Jones had been intended for the Church. The " first step in his artistic life" (a series of pen and ink designs) was not taken till he was twenty-one, and it was not till 1856 that, under Rossetti's influence, he finally selected the artistic career. " He was now close upon twenty-three years of age, a time when painters should have mastered the mechanical part of their craft, and he was only at its beginning " (Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, vol. i. pp. 100, 136).] 2 [Ten years later Ruskin proclaimed the realisation of such predictions. The work of Burne-Jones, he said, " is simply the only art-work at present produced in England which will be received by the future as 'classic' in its kind" (Fors Clavigera, Letter 79) ; and compare, again, The Art oj England, Lecture ii., and The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism. ] 3 [Plate VI. ; the sketch is now in the Ruskin Drawing School.] 4 [From the Prologue to the Legends of Goode Women. Chaucer wrote, after the first line : p. 208 MODERN ART
So much for Ruskin's influence on the formal and concep- tual aspects of Burne-Jones s later work; there remains the question of its content. A very large proportion of Burne- Jones s paintings from now on were "ideal grotesques" in the Ruskinian sense, whether they were simply allegorical fig- ures — Faith, Hope, Charity, Temperance; illustrated classical mythology; or took their subjects from Chaucer or Spenser, both of whom Ruskin saw as mines of "sacred truth.'' Two tasks that he undertook for Ruskin shortly after his return from Italy underline the connection. The first was a set of car- toons for needlework that was to be carried out for Ruskin by the girls of Winnington Hall, the school he patronized in Cheshire (fig. 67). The cartoons correspond exactly to Ruskin's ideal, each showing a heroine from Chaucer's "The Legend of Goode Wimmen" as a "beautiful" figure in "perfect repose," and it is not surprising that they also featured in the "Modern Art" lecture, the speaker taking them along to show his audience as an illustration of his meaning. In this case the work was a labor of love on the part of Burne-Jones, But about the same time Ruskin commissioned him to design a series of allegorical and mythological figures to illustrate Munera Pulveris, his controversial papers on political economy that had begun to appear in Frasers Magazine in 1863. Nothing much came of this, but Ruskin's ideas can be traced in The Wine of Circe (fig. 24), a major painting based on one of the designs which did much to establish Burne-Jones's reputation when it was exhibited in 1869. It might be thought that Circe, the sorceress famous for turning Ulysses' companions into swine, was hardly a force for good; but in Ruskin's analysis she is precisely that, "her power [being] that of frank and full vital pleasure, which, if governed and watched, nourishes men." 41 Moreover, comparison of the early sketches with the finished work shows that during its six-year gestation the picture grew increasingly close to the "constant" ideal. Circe herself becomes more poised and graceful, and her setting, having started as a dim and claustrophobic" cell, very medieval in feeling, ends as an elegant, light-filled chamber with classi- cal furnishings.
Replying to an enquiry from PN, William Waters stated: It is confusing! The figures on the left are as follows: Ariadne Cleopatra Hypermnestra Hypsiphele Thisbe I hope this clears up the inconsistences caused by some anonymous person after they were designed in 1864 for Birket Foster.