The serious revival of interest in the ancient Arthurian leg- ends among the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites can be traced to Burne-Jones's famous discovery of Robert Southey's 1817 edition of Thomas Malory s Le Morte d'Arthur in a Birmingham bookshop in 1855. "I remember I could not buy the precious book," he confided in 1880. "I used to read it in a bookseller s shop day after day, and bought cheap books to pacify the owner, but Morris got it at once and we feasted on it long." 1 "With Edward it became literally a part of himself," Georgiana later recalled. "Its strength and beauty, its mystical religion and noble chivalry of action, the world of lost history and romance in the names of people and places — it was his own birthright upon which he entered." 2 Burne-Jones's first opportunity to paint an Arthurian sub- ject was provided by the 1857 campaign of mural painting in the old Debating Hall (now the Library) of the Oxford Union Society. He chose Merlin and Nimue, opposing two hieratic figures within a mysterious landscape, in a bold composition which struck Rossetti as "a perfect masterpiece." 3 With the appropriate text prominently displayed on the inner frame, this subsequent watercolor of the same subject is an important avowal of the artist's delight in the simple inten- sity of the medieval story. His passion for Malory's original had encouraged him to challenge Tennyson, in an encounter at Little Holland House in 1858, over the poet's treatment of Nimue in his forthcoming Idylls of the King (1859). Burne-Jones was pained "when he found the poet in his Idyll had modernized and altered the character while preserving the ancient name," and was relieved when Tennyson "good-naturedly" agreed to change it to Vivien. 4 A Lady of the Lake who had been introduced to Camelot by King Pellinore, Nimue proved fatally attractive to Merlin. The passage from Malory cited by Burne-Jones describes how she effected her escape from his advances, luring Merlin to his doom under an enchanted stone which he had revealed to her, so that "he came never out for all the craft that he could do." In this strikingly simple composition, Merlin seems physically to shrink in scale beside the imperious figure of his nemesis (painted from Rossetti's then-favorite model, Fanny Cornforth), now armed with the magician's book of spells. Reviewing Burne-Jones's retro- spective exhibition at the New Gallery in the winter of 1892-93, F. G. Stephens remarked that "the poetry of the drawing is most clearly manifest in the back- ground, a weird landscape closed by gloomy purple hills, . . . while evening shadows creep towards us over the vale and magic lake at its foot." 5 Merlins little black dog tugs vainly at his master's sleeve, emphasizing his powerlessness — a note of darkly comic humor of a kind also found in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner 8c Co. s series of stained-glass windows illustrating the story of Tristram and Iseult (Bradford Art Galleries and Museums), to which Burne-Jones contributed four subjects in 1861-62. 1. Memorials, vol. 1, p. 117. 2. Ibid., p. 116. 3. Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, July 1858, in which Rossetti describes the subject as "Merlin being imprisoned beneath a stone by the Damsel of the Lake"; Rossetti, Letters, vol. 1 (1965), p. 337. The mural is reproduced in William Holman Hunt, Oxford Union Society: The Story of the Painting of the Pictures on the Walls and the Decorations on the Ceiling of the Old Dining Hall (Now the Library) in the Years 1857—8—9 (Oxford, 1906); see also Christian 1981b, pp. 38-40. 4. Memorials, vol. 1, p. 182. 5. Athenaeum, January 14, 1893, p. 58.
Signed and dated: "EBJ 1861" in cartouche lower left. Signe and inscribed on the reverse of the original frame in the artist's hand "E Burne Jones The Enchantment of Nimue: how by subtlety she caused Merlin to pass under a heavy stone into a grave." Fanny Cornforth modelled for Nimué Fitzwilliam work list " 1862 Merlin - Mr Leathart"
Examples include the frames of Merlin and Nimuë (this has an inscribed architrave frame, a gilt oak mount with butt-joints, and a sight edge of dark stained oak); also Cupid’s forge, which has a similar outer frame but with added roundels and an unelaborated gilt oak mount[8]; those of The backgammon players, adapted from the Pre-Raphaelite ‘reed-&-roundel’ frame[9], and Cinderella with bay leaf mouldings like those on the Von Borks [10]. The Frame Blog