Originally designed for the large work `Arthur in Avalon' to form part of its atmosphere. Five figures stand nude on the steps of the rocks as it were the embodied spirits of the hills. A natural arch roofs them over and a spring gushes forth into a pool below. -Robert Benson This and its companion picture, under the same number, represent a part of the design for the `Arthur in Avalon', which was not adopted in the final form given to it by the painter. -New Gallery Catalogue 1898 In the original scheme was a central picture of the sleeping king, and on each side another narrow one containing what he called Hill Fairies- the magical side of the story being thus insisted on. -Lady Burne-Jones 1904 These two large upright paintings were originally designed to hang either side of The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon, Burne-Jones' masterpiece. They were separated at the time of the Burne-Jones studio sale, briefly reunited for the memorial exhibition at the New Gallery in 1898 and have now been reunited after almost a hundred years. Burne-Jones was originally commissioned to paint Arthur in Avalon by his patron George Howard, Earl of Carlisle, in 1881. The painting, which at over twenty feet long is the largest of all Burne-Jones's surviving pictures, was originally designed to hang in the library at Naworth Castle, Cumberland, but, wrote Lady Burne-Jones, the idea of it lay deep in Edward's mind and the scope of it grew until it ceased to suit its original purpose, and Mr. George Howard resigned his claim upon it, satisfying himself instead with a relief by Sir Joseph Boehm of Flodden Field based on Burne-Jones's design. There it remained for nearly ten years; advancing slowly, but the thought of it constantly upon him. Originally, according to Lady Burne-Jones, the Hill Fairies were to have surrounded the central picture of the sleeping king and at some stage too he purposed that Arthur's quiet resting place should have a background of battle raging on the outer world (Idem). The composition would therefore have been in the form of an enormous triptych. However, both these schemes were rejected in favour of a quieter scheme of the central bower flanked by three girls. A photograph by Frederick Hollier of the painting in progress shows Burne-Jones experimenting with the triptych idea- these are very similar rock formations to those found in the background to the Hill Fairies but these were later painted out apparently at the request of Helen Mary Gaskell and flowers were substituted. Harris and Waters (op cit) suggest that the reason for these changes were that the fleshy, Michelangelesque figures were out of sympathy with the later concepts. Burne-Jones therefore removed them, reducing the reference to this part of the story to the three girls standing at the outer limits of the composition. In the end only the central panel was retained from the original scheme though the Hill Fairies remained in the studio. Arthur in Avalon, or The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon as it later became, was to occupy Burne-Jones for the rest of his life. It was still not finished to his satisfaction at the time of his death. He strongly identified with the figure of Arthur and saw in the Sleep of Arthur a metaphor for his own approaching death to the point of adopting the position of his hero when he slept and frequently referring to the painting as a place- I am at Avalon, not yet in Avalon and putting the name Avalon as an address on one of his letters. After Burne-Jones's death the Hill Fairies were sold in the artist's studio sale at Christies (Saturday 16 July 1898 lots 86 and 87). Lot 86, the male group, was bought by Agnews for £325.10 and acquired through them by Sir John Holford; lot 87, the female group, was bought by Grosvenor for £105 in the same sale. Grosvenor was presumably the pseudonym for John Buchan, the author, who bought it as a memento of his friendship with the artist. For thirty years the male group hung in the Holford collection at Dorchester House, one of the most important nineteenth century collections of old master paintings in England. It was one of only a handful of modern pictures in the collection. It passed from the collection to David Grieg, an important collector of Victorian pictures. The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon hung for a time in the dining room of Walpole House, the Mall, Chiswick and is now in the Museo de Arte, Ponce, Puerto Rico. In the New Gallery exhibition it was exhibited separately from the Hill Fairies, which were instead hung either side of a large tapestry from his Grail series. One of Burne-Jones's last projects was to provide a series of designs for costumes and scenery for Comyns Carr's King Arthur performed at the Lyceum under Henry Irving's direction in 1904, and it was Comyns Carr who was invited to write the introduction to the memorial exhibition. He wrote of the unfinished Avalon, wherein it would seem he had designed to give us all that was most winning in the brightly coloured dreams of youth, combined with all that was richest in the gathered resource of maturity. The Hill Fairies panels, reunited after almost a century, convey this combination of youthfulness and maturity and as the original flanking panels of his greatest work, his cherished design... a task of love to which he put no limit of time or labour (Memorials II page 116) give us a unique insight into the art of his closing years.
A more finished version of the male Hill Fairies is in the Towneley Art Gallery, Burnley, Lancashire.
These paintings are related to The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon (fig 1), the enormous canvas to which Burne-Jones devoted so much time and thought during the last seventeen years of his life. The picture was commissioned in 1881 by his friend, patron and sometime pupil George Howard, later Earl of Carlisle. it was to fill a wall in the library at Howard's Cumberland seat, Naworth Castle, and, in accordance with its mural-like purpose, was to be "very simply painted". The canvas was so large that a special studio had to be taken for it in Campden Hill Road. "There", wrote Lady Burne-Jones inn her Memorials of her husband, "it remained for nearly ten years, advancing slowly but the thought of it constantly with him". In fact as early as 1882 the subject had acquired a deep personal significance for Burne-Jones, "The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon is my chief dream now", he wrote that autumn, "and I think i can put into it all i most care for". he was beginning to experience phenomenon common to many middle aged and elderly artists, a need to return to early sources of inspiration, to re-find imaginative and intellectual roots. Although he had never ceased to revere Malory's Morte d'Arthur, the book which had made such an overwhelming impact on him in the 1850s, his work had moved far away from it in spirit, first by succumbing to the prevailing classicism of the 1860s, and then by becoming so Italianate under the influence of his last two visits to Italy in 1871 and 1873. Howard's commission had revived his old enthusiasm, and this was to find abundant expression in his later years. While Arthur in Avalon was the prime example, the Holy Grail tapestries which he designed for William Morris in 1891 were almost as important. There was also a whole range of lesser forarys into Arthurian territory, including the designing of sets and costumes for J. Comyns Carr's play King Arthur, staged by Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in 1895. By January 1885 Burne-Jones was hinting to Howard that he should keep the painting that had come to mean so much to him and produce something "simpler" for Naworth. Howard good-naturedly agreed and the "simpler" design, still illustrating the same subject, exists in the form of a large chalk drawing (fig 2). It was never, however, carried out. The only work by Burne-Jones that was to grace the library at Naworth was painted plaster relief representing the Battle of Flodden (1513), in which one of Howard's ancestors had played a leading role. Commissioned in 1880, the relief was intended to go above the chimney-piece, where it remains to this day. It was designed by Burne-Jones in 1882 and executed by the sculptor Joseph Edgar Boehm, although Burne-Jones was unhappy with Boehm's interpretation and had to piece extensively reworked under his own supervison. After many delays, it was finally delivered in January 1886, and Howard himself added the colour. Once Howard had relinquished his claim on Avalon, it became, in Lady Burne-Jones's words, "Edward's own cherished design and he regarded it as a task of love to which he put no limit of time or labour". During the early 1880s he worked on the picture fairly consistently, but it then disappears from his work-record (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) for nearly a decade, largely because he was so preoccupied with another late masterpiece, the Briar Rose Series (Buscot park, Oxfordshire). These were completed in 1890, and the following year Avalon was brought back to "The Grange", Burne-Jones's house in Fulham. It took up an entire wall of the studio at the bottom of the garden, and was worked on in 1894 and 1896, but the studio was too narrow for it to be viewed at a proper distance, and in September 1897 the picture was moved again. This time it was taken to St Paul's Studios, a purpose-built block of artists' studio situated about half a mile from "The Grange". By now Burne-Jones had identified with the subject so completely that he was seeing it a as a metaphor for his own death, which he seems to have sensed was not so far distant. Friends reinforced the conceit,observing that when he dropped off to seep he looked uncannily like the recumbent King. The new studio had a better light than any he had enjoyed in his entire career, an by may 1898 he felt that the picture was "really going" at last. However, it was still not quite finished when he died suddenly of a heart attack on the night of 16 June. It was the last thing he had worked on that morning. The original commission had required a landscape-shaped composition of somewhat elongated proportions. In the centre, the King was seen asleep under a canopy decorated with reliefs illustrating his exploits, behind which and to either side was a marble arcade. He was watched by three Queens and other attendants, some of them play9ing musical instruments, which in the foreground stood armed figures ready to wake him when the dire state of the world required his intervention. All this was fixed from the start and underwent little change, but the areas to left and right proved more problematic. To quote lady Burne-Jones again: "In the original scheme was a central picture of the sleeping King, and on each side another narrow one containing what he called "Hill Fairies" - the magical side of the story being thus insisted upon; also at one time he purposed that Arthur's quiet resting place should have background of battle raging in the4 outer world, but afterwards this was changed, and only the suggestion of it is given in a figure watching at a door, and others looking out and listening to the tumult of the world. This suggests that Burne-Jones originally thought of the work as a triptych, with the so-called Hill-Fairies in the lateral panels, but the issue is far from clear. Bill Waters, in his 1973 monograph on Burne-Jones illustrates a photograph of the unfinished painting, taken by the Kensington photographer Frederick Hollyer, in which the Fairies are incorporated int the main canvas (fig 3). Was Lady Burne-Jones mistaken or was this a second thought, replacing the idea of a triptych? Perhaps only inspection of the painting in Puerto Rico, to see if lateral strips have been added, will answer this question. Nor is other evidence by any means enlightening. Burne-Jones himself tells us little about the picture's development, but reporting on recent work in a letter of November 1883, he wrote that the "fairies in the mountains listening t the music the Queens make in Avalon have all been designed", adding that they were "he-faires and she-fairies, looking ecstatic and silly and very uncombed". Again, in his work-record for 1885 he noted that he had "worked on Avalon, and made the design of the Fairies in the hills of that picture". This at least tell us that he was still happy with the "fairies" idea in the mid-1880s,several years after he had received the commission, but there is no indication of whether it was visualized in terms of wings of a triptych or as part of a single picture. As for the notion of replacing the Fairies with scenes of "battle raging in the outer world", the main evidence for this, apart from lady Burne-Jones's account, is a watercolour in the Koriyama Museum of Art, Japan, dated 1894 (fig 4). The composition is so relentlessly busy that it is not surprising that is was abandoned , but was he really considering this radical alternative at such a late date? or could the drawing be an earlier one worked up as a semi-independent picture in1894, even though there was no longer any question of reproducing the idea in the big canvas? Such a proceeding would, after all, be typical of Burne-Jones. The precise status of the present two pictures is equally elusive. they undoubtedly date from the mid-1880s, the years we know Burne-Jones was working on the "fairies" concept. they seem to be conceived as independent pictures and they are clearly unfinished,being essentially monochrome underpaintings awaiting colour in terms of scumbles and glazes. All this suggests that they are the discarded wings of the triptych described by Lady Burne-Jones. But if this is the case, why are the canvases so much smaller? Admittedly, the wings of triptychs are not always the same height as their central panels, but it is not the norm; and in any case, from all we know of Burne-Jones, he would have hated the jump in scale involved. Or was a triptych as such perhaps never envisaged? Did Lady Burne-Jones write as she did because she knew the present paintings and assumed, mistakenly, that they were the wings of a triptych? Could the paintings in fact be elaborate sketches prepared at the time when Burne-Jones was thinking of including the Fairies in the large canvas, as shown in Hollyer's photograph? The entries in the studio sale catalogue offer no assistance, but that only confirms the ides that lady Burne-Jones 9and for that matter, her son Philip, who was closely involved in drawing up this catalogue) was as much in the dark as we are today. A number of studies for the paintings exist or are recorded. One related to the female Fairies is in the Cleveland Museum of Art, another was with Julian Hartnoll in 1986 (illustrated in the catalogue quoted above). A drawing for two of the males appeared at Sotheby's Belgravia on 17 June 1980, lot23 an two more will be offered in these Rooms on 20 November (lot 34). The Cleveland drawing and one of those coming up at Christie's are dated 1885, which corresponds closely with the work-record evidence. But while there is no doubt that Burne-Jones planned the designs with the utmost care, the two paintings themselves are probably by assistants. Ina sense this does not make them any less "Burne-Joneses". He ran his studio on Renaissance lines, and if the design of a picture was his it was essentially "his" picture. Nonetheless, there was a certain hierarchy of authorship, as George Howard, who knew the Burne-Jones studio intimately, recalled. "The pictures that issued from that studio", he wrote, "may be divided into three classes. In the first, there were pictures that were entirely the work of the master himself. In another group, there were pictures which he had begun and to which he added some finishing touches , after a great part of the actual painting had been done by another hand. Finally, there were pictures for which the master had provided some preliminary sketches but which had been executed entirely by one of Burne-Jones's coadjutors, who had, as a matter of course, set himself to learn and to imitate those details of form that helped to make the master's personal style". The pictures remained in Burne-Jones's studio until his death, and a month later appeared as consecutive lots at his first studio sale. They were then split up, the male Fairies being bought by Agnew's and their female counterparts (who were considerably cheaper) by Burne-Jones's friend the Hon. Norman Grosvenor. This makes it extremely unlikely that, as has been claimed, the pictures were no. 151 in the artist's memorial exhibition, held at the new Gallery in the winter of 1898-9. the exhibited pictures, though entitled Hill-Fairies and identical to ours in size, were lent by Burne-Jones's executors, and so cannot have been the canvases that found new owners at the studio sale. they have been other versions, a fact that may have some bearing on the some bearing on the questions of status and identity discussed above. The paintings remained apart until recent times. The "males" were acquired by Colonel Sir George Holford to augment the magnificent collection of Old Masters built up by his father, Robert Stayner Holford (1808-18920, at Dorchester House, park Lane. they seem to have been bought direct from Agnew's. together with two other Burne-Joneses that Agnew's had purchased at the studio sale, The Sirens (Ringling Museum, Sarasota) and Love praying to mercury for Eloquence (untraced). They were probably acquired on the advice of George Holford's brother-in-law, Robert Henry Benson, who had known Burne-Jones and owned examples of his work himself (one, Music, was sold in these rooms on 14 march 1997 (lot 56) and is now in the Lloyd Webber Collection); and they certainly appear in the superb catalogue of the Holford Collection that Benson published in 1927, the year of George Holford's death. The following year they appeared in the Holford sale at Christie's, and were sold without reserve for 200 guineas. This was considerably less than they made in 1898, a reflection of the fact that such pictures were now out of fashion. Meanwhile the female Fairies were enjoying a slightly quieter existence. they descended to Norman Grosvenor's daughter, Susan, who married the novelist John Buchan, later Lord Tweedsmuir, and remained in the family until they were sold at Christie's in June 1982. The paintings were eventually re-united by Peter Nahum in the early 1990s, and have remained together ever since. Christie's 26 November 2003