A pair to Sidonia von Bork (cat. no. 12), the pendant picture shows the gentle Clara von Dewitz, who serves as a foil to Sidonia in Meinhold's romance. Married to Marcus Bork, Sidonias virtuous cousin, she protects the witch when she gets into trouble as a result of her heinous crimes, only to be repaid with a hideous fate: Sidonia gives her a philter to induce the appear- ance of death, and she is entombed alive. Wearing her "cit- ron" dress, Clara holds a clutch of fledgling doves to symbolize her innocence, while a black cat, Sidonia's familiar, looks up at them with predatory longing. If the worldly Fanny Cornforth seems to be the model for Sidonia, it would appear that Clara is a likeness of Georgiana Macdonald, the high-minded daughter of a Methodist minister whom Burne-Jones married in June 1860, about the time the two pictures were painted. It is worth noting that while Sidonia is signed "E. Burne Jones," Clara is signed simply "E. Jones. "The artist was beginning to use the double-barreled name, but it was not yet invariable practice and the hyphen was still lacking.
Signed and dated on cartouche lower left " E Jones pinxit 1860". Original oak mount inscribed below : Clara von Bork 1560. It is a tabby cat by her feet that eyes the baby birds that Clara carries.
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 [Madox 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
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 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.
