The present drawing is a large-scale study for a needlework frieze conceived to decorate the dining room at Rounton Grange, Yorkshire, the grand home designed by Philip Webb for the wealthy northern iron and steel manufacturer, Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell. Morris & Company were commissioned by Bell to decorate the interior, and it was one of the firm's most important schemes involving wallpaper, painted ceilings, furniture, and an early example of carpets that were woven at Merton Abbey from 1881. The frieze ran around three of the dining-room walls, illustrating Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose, with Burne-Jones designing the figures whilst Morris worked on the backgrounds. The needlework itself was carried out by Bell’s wife, Margaret, and their daughters, Ada and Florence. The scheme took eight years to execute, and was finally completed in 1882. Though the room was later dismantled, the frieze is now displayed at the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow. The Roman de la Rose, one of the most popular secular texts in medieval literature, is an allegory embodying the conventions of courtly love written by Guillaume de Lorris in the 13th century. The poet or pilgrim seeks his beloved, who takes the form of a rose in a beautiful garden, only gaining her love after many trials and tribulations. We know from the watercolourist George Price Boyce’s diary that Burne-Jones was aware of a beautiful fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the Roman de la Rose produced in Bruges, as he ordered the work to show Boyce during a trip to the British Museum in April 1860. However, the text itself was familiar to Burne-Jones mainly through the translation into Middle-English made by Chaucer, a poet who had inspired the artist since he was an undergraduate at Oxford. Burne-Jones had a lifelong interest in Chaucer’s work, collaborating with William Morris on the 1896 version of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, which featured his wood-cut illustrations. Spes and Daphne is taken from the scene where the Pilgrim enters the Garden of Idleness and is introduced to the Virtues, arranged in four pairs of figures: Spes and Daphne, Love and Beauty, Largesse and Richesse and Courtesie and Fraunchise. These figures are to aid the Pilgrim in the search for his beloved. The present work belongs to a group of large-scale pencil drawings of the pairs, and Courtesie and Fraunchise in the Garden of Idleness sold in these Rooms on 17 June 2014 for £542,500. The drawings made by Burne-Jones for the Rounton Grange frieze are among his finest, and like so much of his work in the 1870s, they show him at his most Italianate. Executed within a few years of his last two visits to Italy (1871 and 1873), this influence can be seen in his use of hard pencil and billowing drapery. The scheme proved particularly fertile for Burne-Jones and several large oil paintings came out of the project, including Love Leading the Pilgrim (Tate Britain, London) which was begun in 1877 and completed twenty years later, when it appeared at the New Gallery as the artist's last major exhibited picture.
Fitzwilliam work list 1874... designed the first panel for the Romance of the Rose for Hugh Bell... designed the second panel of the Romance of the Rose 1876 ... designed the procession in Romance of the Rose