In the early 1860s Burne-Jones exchanged pen and ink for watercolor as his primary medium, and these two imagi- nary portraits (cat. nos. 12, 13) are among the earliest results. Though still in a tight and finicky style which looks back to his pen-and-ink drawings, the two pictures show him already using bodycolor to create an effect reminiscent of oils, an approach that remained characteristic throughout his later work. The pictures were painted during the summer of i860 and completed by August, when the young artist and his wife, Georgiana, who had married in June, went to stay at Red House, Upton, in Kent, the newly built home of their friends William and Jane Morris. In October the frames were being made by Burne-Jones's father, who ran a small carving and gilding business in Birmingham. Still on the paintings, they are rare examples of their maker s handiwork, for reasons later explained by Lady Burne-Jones: "The father was very happy in framing his sons pictures, but, alas, any original design which must be exactly carried out baffled the skill of his small work- shop, and Edward had gently and by degrees to let the arrange- ment drop." 1 The pictures were bought by James Leathart (1820- 1895), the Newcastle industrialist. The owner of one of the finest collections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, he was typ- ical of the self-made middle -class men who were the artist's most loyal and appreciative patrons. 2 Leathart also owned Buondelmontes Wedding (cat. no. 7) and The Merciful Knight (cat. no. 26). After his death the collection was dispersed by the Goupil Gallery, and the two von Bork watercolors were acquired by Graham Robertson, the young aesthete whose later recollections of Burne-Jones are so often quoted in this catalogue. A version of Sidonia von Bork (private collection), also painted in i860, was acquired by another important early patron, the Leeds stockbroker T E. Plint. The paintings illustrate Sidonia von Bork: Die K/osterhexe, a spine-chilling Gothic romance by Johann Wilhelm Meinhold (1797-1851) which was published in 1847 and reissued two years later in an English translation by Lady Wilde, Oscar Wilde's mother, under the title Sidonia the Sorceress, Written in the form of a contemporary chronicle, the story traces the career of a woman of noble Pomeranian family who in 1620, at the age of eighty, was burned as a witch at Stettin. Of such beau- ty that all who see her fall in love with her, Sidonia is also incurably vicious. In alliance with her lover, the leader of a gang of outlaws, and latterly at the convent of Marienfliess (hence the books original title), she pursues a life of crime, eventually bewitching the entire ruling house of Pomerania and thereby causing their death or sterility. Here she is seen (according to the date on the mount) as a young woman of twenty, meditating some outrage at the decorous court of the dowager Duchess of Wolgast, the scene of her early crimes. The Duchess herself advances in the distance. Meinhold s work gained currency in England as part of the vogue for German Romantic literature. He was best known for an earlier story, Mary Schweidler: The Amber Witch, which is set in Coserow, a village on the Prussian shore of the Baltic Sea where he was pastor, at the time of the Thirty Years' Wan First published in 1843, the book inspired two English transla- tions and was adapted as an opera by W. V. Wallace, staged at Her Majesty's Theatre, London, in February 1861. Both books were admired in Rossetti's circle, but Sidonia was undoubt- edly the favorite. Rossettl him- self conceived a "positive passion" for it 3 and declared that no work of fiction had impressed him so much until he read Emily Bronte s masterpiece Wuthering Heights (1847) in 1854. 4 Swinburne listed it among his hundred favorite books 5 and claimed that it was a "real work of genius," albeit "the most horrible in liter- ature," 6 while Morris's lifelong admiration is evinced by the fact that he reprinted Lady Wilde's translation at the Kelmscott Press in 1893. In the late 1850s the book served much the same pur- pose as Malory's Morte d' Arthur and the poetry of Robert Browning, two other esoteric lit- erary tastes that the set embraced with relish, providing them with a convenient stick with which to beat the philis- tine. If Ruskin ever told them that his friend Ellen Heaton was "scandalized" by Sidonia, they would no doubt have been delighted. 7 But there was more to the craze than an opportunity to demonstrate exclusivity and epa- ter les bourgeois. Meinhold has a superb visual sense, tricking his story out in brilliant colors and a wealth of picturesque detail, while his combined themes of beauty, evil, and magic proved irresistible to a collective imagi- nation dominated by Rossetti. By nature deeply superstitious, and devoted from childhood to the tales of the supernatural so common in Romantic literature, Rossetti had often treated occult themes in his painting and verse. Burne-Jones was quick to follow. His very first pen-and- ink drawing, The Waxen Image of 1856 (present whereabouts unknown), illustrated a poem of his master s about witchcraft, "Sister Helen"; and witches continued to fascinate him, Sidonia taking her place in a gallery that also included Nimue (cat. nos. 15, 64), Circe, and Morgan le Fay (fig. 24, 55). Needless to say, these were no ordinary witches; they were enchantress- es whose fatal power lay at least partly in their beauty, and this invokes another aspect of Meinhold's influence, his impact on the circles cult of the beautiful woman or, in Pre-Raphaelite slang, the "stunner." Here indeed was the writer's true significance so far as these devotees were concerned. By adding a dimension of menace to their worship of female beauty, his book proved a potent source for depictions of the femme fatale, a concept that looms so large in later Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist imagery. Meinhold's influence had a visual counterpart in the debt that Rossetti and his associates owed at this period to early German engravers, a debt revealed particularly clearly in the Diireresque qualities of Burne-Jones's pen-and-ink drawings. In fact, Burne-Jones's image of Sidonia is partly based on a likeness of the witch by a follower of Lucas Cranach (1472-1553) that Meinhold claimed to have seen "at Stargord, near Regenwalde, in the castle of the Count von Bork." Like the "Cranach," Burne- Jones's picture shows Sidonia "in the prime of mature beauty," with "a gold net drawn over her almost golden yellow hair," and carrying "a pompadour of brown leather." As for her highly distinctive dress, it seems to owe something to a terrifying figure that Meinhold describes as having been "added, after a lapse of many years, to the youthful portrait The sorceress is arrayed in her death garments — white with black stripes." 8 This feeling for Diirer and his contemporaries was part of the circle's general medievalism, and Burne-Jones's two paint- ings betray another aspect of this, his involvement with the rich, somber decorative schemes that characterized the Gothic Revival in his High Victorian phase. There are hints in the backgrounds of stained-glass windows such as he was design- ing for Powell's and would soon design for Morris, as well as in massive pieces of furniture of the type he was decorating for Morris, Seddon, and Burges. The pictures' color harmonies — reddish browns and blacks set off against passages of dull white, acid yellow, deep blue, and green — are precisely those of the ecclesiastical and domestic interiors to which he was contributing during these early years. At the same time, the pictures reflect the taste for the six- teenth century that was gradually modifying and even suc- ceeding medievalism. There was a sudden interest in Renaissance crimes, probably largely due to Swinburne, whose devotion to Meinhold, like his better-known passion for the more gory products of the Elizabethan dramatists, sprang from his preoccupation with sadomasochism and the connec- tion between love and pain. It is no accident that Burne-Jones's von Bork pictures were painted at a moment when his relations with Swinburne were particularly close. "He had rooms very near us," Georgie recalled on the very page of the Memorials on which she mentions the pictures' frames, "and we saw a great deal of him; sometimes twice or three times in a day he would come in, bringing his poems hot from his heart and certain of welcome and a hearing at any hour." 9 The two men must often have discussed Swinburne's verse play The Queen Mother, about Catherine de' Medici and the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, which was published in 1860; his plans for another drama, Chastelard (1865), about a young courtier in love with Mary, Queen of Scots, who is executed after being discovered in her bedroom; or again, the prose and verse he aimed to write about his "blessedest pet" Lucretia Borgia, in whose "holy family" he had taken "the deepest and most rever- ential interest" since childhood. 10 One of these pieces was "A Ballad of Life," the opening poem in his Poems and Ballads, which was dedicated to Burne-Jones in 1866 and contains many parallels with his work. But the clearest evidence of a shared interest lies in Swinburne's article "Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence," published in the Fortnightly Review in 1868, in which the writer describes his friend's picture of Sidonia as a "nobler" study of a witch than one by Filippino Lippi (1457— 1504) a l ready won his admiration. Rossetti himself never illustrated Meinhold, but he did paint Borgia subjects, and Lucretia Borgia (Tate Gallery, London), a watercolor of 1860-61, is closely related to Burne- Jones's Sidonia in both thematic (Lucretia is seen washing her hands after administering poison to her husband) and compo- sitional terms. 11 In fact they are effectively twin, contemporary expressions of the same idea. Rossetti's attraction to the Borgia story even overcame his indifference to music, and he became a fan of Donizetti's opera Lucrezia Borgia, which was often per- formed at Covent Garden at this period, with Giulia Grisi and Giuseppe Mario in the leading roles. He urged his friends to see it too, and Burne-Jones, who was much more interested in music than his master, may well have done so. Just as the taste for German engravings belonged to a wider medievalism, so the interest in Renaissance subjects was an integral part of the more sensuous style, heavily indebted to Venetian sixteenth-century painting, that emerged in Rossetti s circle in the late 1850s. As already noted, this phe- nomenon had much to do with the advent of Fanny Cornforth as Rossetti s model and mistress. Her florid good looks and thick blond hair made her the natural muse of the new idiom, and it is remarkable how her physical type corresponded to that of the heroines who were then in vogue. The set was well aware of the lock of Lucre tia Borgia's golden hair that is preserved, together with her letters to Cardinal Bembo, in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan; and Sidonia, as we have seen, had "golden yellow hair," in the "Cranach" portrait so vividly described by Meinhold. In fact, Fanny may well have been the model for Burne-Jones's Sidonia von Bork. Although she is best known for her frequent appearances in Rossetti's paintings, she is recorded sitting to Burne-Jones in January 1858, 12 and her features may be traced in several of his early works (see also cat. nos. 15, 19). The dependence of the new style on Venetian painting also finds an echo in Sidonia von Bork. Visiting the Pitti in Florence in September 1859, Burne-Jones had made a sketch of Titian's La Bella (153 6), 13 and for Sidonia he had a source in mind which, if not actually Venetian, is comparable to Titian's famous portrait and other works of this type that the artists were studying. According to Edward Clifford, Burne-Jones's follower and faithful copyist and at one time the owner of the second version of Sidonia, the witch's dress, with its fantastic serpentine pattern, was "suggested by a picture at Hampton Court." 14 Situated within easy reach of London, the great Tudor palace was a favorite haunt of the circle at this date. There are other accounts of their studying the pictures which, significantly, include many Venetian works. But the picture that arrested Burne-Jones's attention was the portrait of Isabella d'Este, then attributed to Parmigianino (1503-1540) but now given to his contemporary Giulio Romano. It clearly "suggested" not only the design of Sidonia's dress but the motif of figures entering and leaving the room in the watercolor's upper right corner, while it probably contributed to its gener- al spirit, being itself a curiously sinister and menacing image. Even the portrait's surroundings were probably influential. The artists were constantly on the lookout for appropriate set- tings for their pictures. Rossetti had fallen for another Tudor mansion, Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, in 1857, and in i860 he considered renting a chateau near Boulogne which he thought would provide "very paying backgrounds." 15 Hampton Court must have had a similar appeal, with its narrow corridors and airless closets, not to mention their outdoor extension, the famous maze, in which Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and their wives got "lost" during a visit to the palace in October i860. 16 For anyone dealing imaginatively with the subject of Renaissance crimes, here was an authentic and highly evoca- tive mise-en-scene. [jc] 1. Memorials, vol. 1, p. 215. 2. See Paintings from the Leathart Collection (exh. cat., Newcastle upon Tyne: Laing Art Gallery, 1968). 3. William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir (London, 1895), vol. 1, p. 101. 4. Rossetti, Letters, vol. 1 (1965), p. 224. 5. Pall Mall Gazette, January 26, 1886, p. 2. 6. Quoted in J. Saxon Mills, Sir Edward Cook (London, 1921), p. 28211. 7. Virginia Surtees, ed., Sublime and Instructive: Letters from John Ruskin to Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, Anna Blunden and Ellen Heaton (London, 1972), p. 251. 8. William Meinhold, Sidonia the Sorceress, translated by Lady Wilde, 3d ed. (London, 1926). pp. vi-vii. 9. Memorials, vol. 1, p. 215. 10. Cecil Y. Lang, ed., The Swinburne Letters (London, 1959-62), vol. 6, p. 164. 11. The connection is more obvious in the photograph of the picture as originally painted than in the work itself, which was extensively retouched in 1869; see H. C. Marillier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1926), pp. vi-vii. 12. Ford M. Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown (London, 1896), p. 154. 13. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 14. [Edward Clifford], Broadlands As It Was (London, 1890), p. 55. 15. Rossetti, Letters, vol. 1 (1965), p. 367. 16. Ibid., p. 381.
Signed and dated on scroll lower right "1869 E Burne Jones fecit" Edward Clifford "Broadlands as it was" p 54 pub 1890. " Burne Jones naturally felt drawn to paint sorceresses. Twice he painted the cruel "Sidonia von Bork" ( avoid her history as most infernal literature) delighting in laboriously investing her with a gorgeous gown covered with a snake-pattern, which was suggested to him by a picture at Hampton Court. She is in a dire passion and vents it by tearing at there necklace and shooting furious looks at her intended mother-in-law." Malcolm Bell is confused in his description of the two versions of Sidonia. The text refers to the first version which is illustrated op p22 but his text assumes that this painting was actually the second versiona pair to Clara. NB The principle differences between the two are First version: Sidonia's hair is loose, there is a bottle glass window in the upper left corner and the signature EJB is at the bottom left. Giulio Romano's painting inspired the artist to adopt the use of a section of a painting to create a deep recession within the picture's plain, in which a separate anecdote takes place that relates to the main theme. It is a device that pierces the picture plain and grew in importance as the artist matured.
A number of Burne-Jones’s watercolours have frames identical to those designed by Brown and Rossetti during the 1850s; and interestingly he seems to have retained some of those patterns for occasional use throughout his career. The paired settings of Sidonia and Clara von Bork (Fig. 2), which were painted at Morris’s home, the Red House, are early examples of these Brown/Rossetti designs; they were actually made by Burne-Jones’s father. In October 1860 his son wrote to him, ‘How soon can I have those frames? I am waiting for two of them now to sell the drawings they belong to – it makes such a difference having them in frames, that I don’t care to shew them without.’ [5] The pictures have kept their gilt oak, butt-jointed mounts with the titles on dark gold scrolls at the bottom, and Sidonia, above, still has the original outer frame of slender astragals set close together and decorated with bay leaves. This frame re-appears on several later studies, and is clearly in direct imitation of Rossetti’s frames [6]. Unfortunately, however, Burne-Jones’s father was not the most competent of framemakers, and the bay-leaf astragals around the pendant, Clara von Bork, have had to be replaced. As Georgiana Burne-Jones noted, ‘… the father was very happy in framing his son’s pictures, but, alas, any original design which must be exactly carried out baffled the skill of his small workshop, and Edward had gently and by degrees to let the arrangement drop through.’ [7] His father’s skills were patently not up to the innovations of the 1860s, let alone the canon of designs subsequently amassed by Burne-Jones. In this first decade they are almost exclusively derived from work by – and probably made under the aegis of – Brown and Rossetti. The Frame Blog