The present picture was executed as a cartoon for one of the panels in the east window of All Saints in Cambridge, an important commission executed in 1866 by Morris and Company to Burne-Jones' designs. The lower tier of panels at All Saints depicts five female saints: Saint Barbara, Saint Agnes, Saint Radegunda, Saint Dorothy and Saint Catherine. Burne-Jones account book records that he was paid £4.4 for producing a design for each of these windows in August 1866. 'Saint Dorothy' relates to a fascinating friendship between Burne-Jones and his patron and fellow artist George Howard, the Earl of Carlisle and his wife Rosalind. Howard was introduced to Burne-Jones by the artist Val Prinsep who took the Earl to Burne-Jones' studio where they immediately warmed to one another and quickly became friends. Howard was a talented amateur artist, who was studying at the South Kensington School of Art when he and Burne-Jones met and Burne-Jones gave him further tuition in drawing. The Howards were also very keen collectors of art, Sidney Colvin commented, 'No more exceptional or attractive young couple gathered about them in those days a more varied company of talents and distinctions whether in art, literature or politics.' Caroline Dawkers, The Holland Park Circle; Artists and Victorian Society,1999, p.89. Howard's most impressive pictures were those by Burne-Jones, the most famous work carried out for Howard being the decorative frieze depicting the story of Cupid and Psyche for the dining room at the Howards' home in Palace Green. Among the smaller works by Burne-Jones, bought by Howard, was a set of designs for stained glass windows, commissioned by him for Brampton Church in Cumberland (now at Carlisle City Art Gallery). One of the panels for this window depicted Saint Dorothea and although this commission was not received by Burne-Jones until 1878, long after he had painted the present 'Saint Dorothy', it is likely that Howard had requested the Saint's inclusion at Brampton owing to his own admiration of this watercolour. Howard's own pencil portrait of Burne-Jones (Castle Howard) depicts him at his easel drawing a haloed female saint, certainly a reference to Burne-Jones as a designer of stained glass. In return Burne-Jones used Howard for the figure of the Emperor Theophilus in his various versions of a composition entitled 'Theophilus and the Angel' made between 1863 and 1868. Theophilus was the mocking Roman scribe who taunted Dorothy when she was to be put to death by the Roman Governor Fabricus, saying that if her God was as powerful as she professed he would send apples and roses from Heaven in the heart of winter as proof of his eminence. After Saint Dorothy's martyrdom, the Lord sent roses and apples to Theophilus leading to his own conversion and execution for the same crime of refusing to worship the Roman gods. Saint Dorothy holds the sword with which she was martyred and the cherub holds a basket of the heaven-grown roses. During the 1860s, Burne-Jones made several trips to Italy to study the Old Masters. John Ruskin, who accompanied Burne-Jones on an 1862 visit, impressed upon him the importance of learning from the great Italian painters. 'Saint Dorothy' resembles one of the early Italian Madonnas much admired by both Burne-Jones and Howard; a protector of children with an Italian putto at her feet. A painting which relates closely to 'Saint Dorothy' is Burne-Jones' 'Saint Agnes' which also began its existence as a design for All Saints Church. A painting of 1869-70 was known to exist, depicting all the female saints from the All Saints windows, entitled 'St Barbara, St Dorothy and St Agnes' (destroyed) and a reference in Burne-Jones' account book for 1866 suggests that there was a further, unlocated painting of 'Saint Barbara' which made a trio with 'St Agnes' and the present picture, all pictures being of equal dimensions. Sketches in bodycolour on coloured paper for 'St Barbara' and 'St Dorothy' are in a private collection. 'Saint Dorothy' has a gentle and delicately painted face while her clothing is painted with a fluidity and boldness which is repeated in Burne-Jones' depiction of the child. Burne-Jones experimented with a wide variety of paints in this work, to powerful effect, almost giving the painting the appearance of a miniature fresco. 'Saint Dorothy' combines an innovative expressiveness with a warm and loving intimacy. Bonhams 2004
A watercolour and chalk studies for the East Window of All Saints church in Cambridge, built by the English Gothic Revival architect, George Frederick Bodley. All Saints is situated in Jesus Lane, opposite Jesus College for which the artist was to design some of his greatest windows in the following decade. All Saints was constructed between 1863 and 1870, and the full window scheme was produced by Morris & Co. in 1866. However, several of the individual figures had been designed earlier in the 1860s for different churches. Twelve out of the twenty figures were designed by Burne-Jones himself, nine of which were original designs. Of the residual figures, four were designed by Ford Madox Brown, all of them initially created for other churches. The remaining four were conceived by William Morris. Burne-Jones charged four guineas each for most of the cartoons, the only exceptions being the figures of Adam and Eve in the top tier, which cost the parish another guinea apiece. This may have been because the employment of nude models was involved. The following two studies are full length vertical compositions for the figures of St Agnes and St Dorothy, who can both be found in the lowest row in the East Window, closest to the congregation. The window's lowest tier represents five female saints noted for their rejection of matrimony. St Agnes is second from the left; the others, from left to right, are saints Barbara, Radegunda, Dorothy and Catherine of Alexandria. The complete East Window design shows Christ Enthroned (also designed by Burne-Jones) above a chorus of angels flanked by Adam and Eve, with seventeen saints, leaders and biblical figures below. St Agnes (lot 107) was designed specifically for this window in 1866, and she is easily recognisable due to her attributes of the lamb she holds in her arms, indicative of her innocence, and the palm branch which signifies her as a martyr. St Dorothy is a lesser known saint. Part of her story is that she met a mysterious child on the way to her martyrdom, and they are depicted here, reaching for her hand with their angelic wings clearly visible. She is also depicted with a sword in her right hand, the instrument of her execution. Burne-Jones was commissioned to render his designs as cartoons with transferable outlines, so the inclusion here of the backgrounds are, as Luke Farey describes, ‘intriguingly superfluous’ since in the finished stained glass panels the saints are both surrounded with textual and floral ornamentation (L. Farey, Visions and Visionaries: Visions and Imaginings in Blake, Burne-Jones, Allen Ginsberg, John Latham and other masters, Llandysul, 2018, p. 48). The presence of the more developed backgrounds are thus suggestive that Burne-Jones added them for his own pleasure, conceiving the studies as works of art in their own right, and not simply as decorative designs.
As so often with Burne-Jones, the picture is based on a design, in this case a light in the east window at All Saints Church, Cambridge. In fact it was almost certainly developed directly on top of the stained -glass cartoon. At this date Burne-Jones would have drawn the cartoon in sepia wash, providing an ideal underpainting for a picture which, though actually inn watercolour,uses bodycolour so extensively that it has something of the density of oil. these are a number of other examples of Burne-Jones recycling his early cartoons in this way. All Saints Church in Jesus lane, Cambridge, was built by G.F. Bodley in the early 1860s, replacing a medieval church in St John's Street that had become too small for an expanding parish. Bodley had worked with William Morris and his firm before, so they were a natural choice to execute the east window. Designed and erected in 1866, this consisted of four tiers of five lights with tracery above (fig. 2). Burne-Jones provided most of the cartoons for the twenty standing figures in the principle lights, although Ford Madox Brown contributed three (Abraham, Noah and Edward the Confessor) and William Morris himself two (St Peter and St Catherine). of St Dorothy, Burne-Jones charged four guineas each for most of his cartoons including that of St Dorothy although for some reason. perhaps because nude models were required, the figures of Adam and Eve in the top tier cost the parish another guinea apiece. The lowest tier showed five female saints, namely (from left to right) Saints Barbara, Agnes, Radegunda, Dorothy and Catherine. Saints Barbara, Agnes and Dorothy were all to enjoy an afterlife in terms of easel pictures. Both the St Dorothy and the St Agnes cartoons were developed as such, the first resulting in the present picture, the St Agnes in a very comparable work of the same dimensions that was sold st Sotheyb's Belgravia on 24 October 1978, lot 6. It had once been in the enormous collection formed by the soap manufacturer Lord Leverhulme. Smaller versions of Saints Barbara and Dorothy (fig. 3), executed in white bodycolour on blue prepared paper, were sold in these rooms on 3 June 1999, lot 52. At some stage they may have been separated from a similar figure of St Agnes, which is now missing. Certainly all three saints were bought together in a picture of the late 1860s painted for the keenest and most perceptive of all Burne-Jones's patrons, William Graham (fig. 40). Burne-Jones clearly felt that all three of these figures merited reinterpretation in pictorial form but it was the story of St Dorothy that made the most powerful appeal to his imagination. According to legend the saint was a maiden of Caesarea in Cappodocia who suffered martyrdom under the Emperor Diocletian (reigned 284-305 A.D.) for her Christian faith and her refusal to marry on the grounds that she was already the bride of Christ. On her way to execution one bitterly cold winter morning, she was accosted by the notary Theophilus, who mockingly asked her to send him roses from paradise. When they duly arrived by angelic courier, Theophilus too was converted, and eventually, like St Dorothy was martyred and achieved Sainthood. References to this story are made in our picture by the sword in the Saint's right hand, the instrument of her execution, the infant angel carrying a basket of flowers, and the snow that falls in the sky beyond the curtain. But this was by no means Burne-Jones's last word on the subject. In 1867, a year after the All Saint's window was designed and installed , he exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society an important picture in which the story of St Dorothy's martyrdom was told in narrative form. Theophilus and the Angel (fig. 5) was destroyed during the Second World War, but the composition is known from a Hollyer photograph and a copy by Fairfax Murray. The Saint's execution has just taken place in a town square. in the middle distance a group of female spectators is seen leaving a booth, while the Saint's shrouded body is carried off to the night. in the foreground Theophilus turns into a doorway, as yet unaware that an angel is approaching with a basket flowers. This figure had matured since Burne-Jones drew his stained -glass cartoon a year earlier, being no longer a putto but a Botticellian adolescent of indeterminate sex. In fact the legend of St Dorothy enjoyed something of a cult in Burne-Jones's circle at this date. Morris treated it in a discarded story for The Earthly Paradise, the great cycle of narrative poems that he was writing from 1865 and published in 1868-70. It also inspired a poem in Swinburne's notorious Poems and Ballads of 1866. There were probably several reasons for this rather curious vogue. Morris no doubt appreciated the sheer narrative potential of such a colourful story. Swinburne, who makes Theophilus St Dorothy's unrequited lover, was characteristically attracted by the element of sadism involved. As for Burne-Jones, while he was closely associated with both these literary projects, making literally hundreds of illustrations for The Earthly Paradise and accepting the dedication of Poems and Ballads, his interest in the story was inexorably bound up with Ruskin's ongoing attempt to shape his development. Ever since they had met in 1856, Ruskin had regarded Burne-Jones as a protege and tried to influence his progress. Things had come to a head in the summer of 1862 when he had taken the young artist and his wife to north Italy and made him copy pictures by old masters from which he thought he would benefit. this was not, however, the end of the matter. the direction in which Ruskin steered Burne-Jones tended to change according to his own ever-evolving aesthetic priorities. By the mid-1860s his crusade for social and economic reform had led him to develop the concept of "constant art", an art of beautiful forms and calm, hieratic gestures that expressed itself through symbols and rigorously eschewed any sensational drama that might appeal to man's love of the morbid and have harmful social repercussions. He was convinced that Burne-Jones was the artist most capable of putting this ideal into practice, and he actively encouraged him to do so by giving him commissions in which it would be embodied. it may well have been Ruskin who suggested that Burne-Jones should paint St Theophilus and the Angel, and thus demonstrate how a subject with more than its fair share of lurid melodrama could be handled with such taste and discretion that it aroused only elevated thoughts in the spectator. Certainly in a lecture"On the present sate of Modern Art" that he delivered at the Royal Institution in June 1867, Ruskin took the picture, which was currently hanging nearby on the walls of the Old Watercolour Society, as an example of all that he desired to see in contemporary painting. His audience was not of course told that the speaker himself had been at Burne-Jones's side while the work was in progress. All this may seem peripheral to our St Dorothy, but in some ways the picture is even more an expression of Ruskinian values than St Theophilus. Most of the work that Ruskin commissioned from Burne-Jones at this period consisted of single figures replete with symbolic or allegorical meaning. Some illustrated Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, a text in which Ruskin saw deep moral significance, other Munera Pulveris, his own papers on political economy published in Fraser's Magazine in 1863. Our painting and the related treatments of the three female saints in the All Saint's window (figs . 3,4) are very similar to these designs in conception and feeling. the saint's stories are told through emblems, and the figures have all the sweetness and innocence of mien for which Ruskin was looking. There was always n art-historical dimension to Ruskin's aesthetic-cum-moral-gear-shifts, and his campaign for "constant art" was no exception. Whereas formerly he had hero-worshipped artists like Fra Angelico and Tintoretto, so now his sights were focused on the period 1470-1520, "the Age of the Masters", as he called it, who "desire only to make everything dainty, delightful and perfect". Against such a background it is not surprising that the angel in St Theophilus reminds us of Botticelli or Ghirlandaio. Bu t the really significant artist in this context is the Milanese master Bernardo Luini, for whose gentle fairytale-like style Ruskin had conceived a passion. Burne-Jones had copied some of Luini's frescoes for his mentor in Milan in 1862, and the artist's influence on both the forms and the psychology of St Dorothy is very Strong. The picture was given by Burne-Jones to Rosalind Howard, who became the Countess of Carlisle when her husband, George Howard (fig. 6), succeeded to the title as the ninth Earl in 1889. they had married in 1864, when George was twenty-one and Rosalind nineteen. In later years Rosalind was to become a tiresome and domineering figure, quarreling with everyone who did not share her passionate belief in women's suffrage, temperance, and Irish hoke rule. Eventually her marriage itself suffered, and in the late 1880s she and George drifted apart. But twenty years earlier it had seemed as if they had nothing but a golden prospect before them. As their friend Sidney Colvin recalled, "no more exceptional or attractive young couple gathered about them in those days a more varied company of talents and distinctions, whether in art, literature or politics". George was intensely artistic. A good amateur artist himself, he liked nothing more than associating with his professional confreres and exercising the partonage appropriate to his wealth and social status. During their early married life he and Rosalind knew everyone who was anyone in the more advanced art circles of the day. George sat for his portrait to G.F.Watts, Rosalind to Leighton and Rossetti. Legros and others gave George lessons in painting, and in 1866 the Howards commissioned Philip Webb to design them a London house in Kensington, 1 Palace Green. Needless to say, the furnishings were by the Morris firm. But with no one were the couple more intimate with than Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones. They met in the Spring of 1865, when Val Prinsep brought George to Burne-Jones's studio at 41 Kensington Square. Burne-Jones, who was ten years senior to George, was soon yet another of his tutors, but neither this master-pupil relationship nor the fact that George was in a position to wield patronage ever affected their mutual regard. "Your loving friendship is one of the best things I have in life", Burne-Jones told George in 1876 in one of his numerous surviving letters at Castle Howard. Georgiana (Georgie) and Rosalind were on equally close terms, and Rosalind was Georgie's chief confidante when Burne-Jones embarked on his affair with Maria Zambaco in the late 1860s. This led to some sharp exchanges between Rosalind and the errant artist, but the friendship survived and in 1874 Burne-Jones and Morris stayed with the Howards at their Cumberland seat, Naworth Castle. it was on this occasion that Howard made at least one of the drawings of Burne-Jones illustrated here (fig.1), although he has misdated it 1875. Many studies of this kind exist, as much a testament to the friendship as the voluminous correspondence. Nor did George and Rosalind ever waver in their belief that Burne-Jones was a genius, or in their desire to possess his work. They started by buying quite minor works, including a landscape study for The Merciful Knight and two other early watercolours, Fatima (1862) and The Evening Star (1870). But in 1872 they commissioned something much more substantial, a frieze illustrating the story of Cupid and Psyche to run round the upper walls of the dining room of the recently completed house in Palace Green (fig. 7). The scheme was eventually finished a decade later with the help of Walter Crane, and meanwhile many other works had either been commissioned or purchased. They included a set of windows for the chapel at Castle Howard (1872-4); The Annunciation (fig. 8), an important painting exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 18979; bronze reliefs in memory of George's parents in Lanercost priory on the Naworth estate (1879); a massive amount of stained-glass for Webb's new church at Brampton, again not far from Naworth (1878-80); and Arthur in Avalon, a monumental painting intended to adorn the library in the Castle itself. Commissioned in 1881, Avalon was never finished, but Burne-Jones produced a smaller work for the £500 that Howard had advanced, a painted relief depicting the battle of Flodden Field, in whihc one of Howard's ancestor's had played a distinguished part. (For further details of Burne-Jones's relationship with the Howards,see Caroline Dakers, the Holland Park Circle, Yale, 1999, ch. 7. and Christopher Ridgway, "A privileged insider: George Howard and Edward Burne-Jones", British Art Journal, London, vol. III, no 3, Autumn 2002, pp. 4-18). We do not know exactly when the Howards acquired St Dorothy. In April 1867 Rosalind recorded in her diary that they had seen Burne-Jones's "picture of Dorothy" (Ridway, p.8), but this was almost certainly St Theophilus and the Angel, finished and about to go on exhibition at the Old Watercoloour Society. In fact there are several hints that our picture remained in Burne-Jones's studio until 1881, when the Howards' ninth child, a girl, was born. Shen was called Dorothy, so not only would the picture have been an appropriate present but we might have a reason why it was presented specially to her mother. A further link with the Burne-Joneses may lie in the fact that the infant 's second name was Georgiana, as if Rosalind was calling her after one of her closest friends. Could it even be that Georgie Burne0Jones was a godmother? Finally, there is the evidence of the inscriptions on the picture itself. they are written in a style that strongly suggests that they were added in the early 1880s. Burne-Jones died suddenly in June 1898, and that winter St Dorothy together with the great Annunciation (fig.8) and four other works, was lent by the Howards to the artist's memorial exhibition at the new Gallery in Regent Street. George died in 1911 and Rosalind a decade later. After her death her daughter gave the Cupid and Psyche frieze to the Birmingham Art Gallery, while the Annunciation was sold at Sotheby's in June 1922, subsequently entering the Leverhulme collection and ending up in the lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight. other works, however, remained in family possession, whether, like the Castle Howard windows or reliefs at Lanercost and Naworth, they were built into ancestral properties, or descended to George and Rosalind's numerous heirs. Among the latter was St Dorothy, a monument to one of the most fruitful friendships in late Victorian art as well as to a particularly significant moment in the career of Burne-Jones himself. Christie's 23 November 2005