It has often been suggested that this composition owes something to Piero di Cosimo's well-known painting The Death of Procris (ca. 1495), which had entered the National Gallery, London, in 1862. If so, the reminiscence first appears in one of the illustrations to "The Story of Cupid and Psyche" in William Morris s Earthly Paradise, on which the painting is based. Morris originally intended his great cycle of narrative poems to be lavishly illustrated with woodcuts designed by Burne-Jones, who produced hundreds of designs for this pur- pose. In the event, the project proved too ambitious to realize, and the book appeared without illustrations in 1868-70; but the designs provided the artist with compositions for pictures until the end of his life. None were more fertile than those for "Cupid and Psyche," which he executed first, in 1865, and car- ried further than those for any of the other poems; forty- seven finished designs survive (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) and many preliminary sketches (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, and elsewhere). The story, which is taken from The Golden Ass of Apuleius, clearly had great significance for Burne-Jones, no doubt because it can be read as the soul's search for God. In this it is analogous to the legend of the Holy Grail, which he also inter- preted time and again, regarding it as nothing less than "an explanation of life." 1 In the present design Psyche, having lost Cupid, the god of love, through her own disobedience, has thrown herself into a river in an attempt to kill herself; she is, however, saved, and comforted by Pan, the god of nature. In Morris's words: But the kind river even yet did deem That she should live, and, with all gentle care, Cast her ashore within a meadow fair Upon the other side, where Shepherd Pan Sat looking down upon the water wan. The picture is not dated and, unusually, does not appear in Burne -Jones's autograph work record (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) or its derivative, Malcolm Bells monograph on the artist's work, Record and Review (1892). It is generally accepted, however, that it dates from the early 1870s and was produced concurrently with another, slightly larger version, which is well documented. According to the work record, the larger picture was "designed" in 1869, presumably meaning that this was when the Earthly Paradise design was adapted for an easel picture. In 1872 the picture itself was commissioned for £200 by George Hamilton, a business associate of Burne- Jones's chief patron, William Graham. In October of that year Burne-Jones wrote to Hamilton to report that it was "at last . . . becoming something like what I should wish it to be. I think it has given me more trouble than any other picture I have done, and I believe it will end by being one of my best. I hope now to be able to carry it through without further hindrance." In fact, the picture was not finished until 1874, and was retouched as late as 1878. Burne-Jones intended to show it that year at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, together with three other works, including The Beguiling of Merlin (cat. no. 64), but, as he told Hamilton, "At the first glance I saw much that I wanted to do to it, to make it more perfect." After he had "spent about a week over it," it was too late to send it to Paris, and it appeared instead at the Grosvenor Gallery's summer exhibi- tion. 2 Laus Veneris (cat. no. 63) and Le Chant d' Amour (cat. no. 84) were among its companions. One can only speculate as to how the present pic- ture relates to the other painting's long and tangled development. Was it start- ed for experimental pur- poses and completed to make an independent ver- sion, or was it rather in the nature of a fair copy? The figures and foreground are remarkably similar but the backgrounds differ considerably, with the austere Mantegnesque rocks in the Hamilton picture giving way to a sylvan landscape in the work exhibited here. All we know about the latter is that it was bought by Alexander (Alecco) Ionides (1840-1898), a member of the wealthy Anglo-Greek family that figures so prominently in the annals of later Victorian art. Alecco had first made his mark in the mid-i85os when, as a student in Paris with his elder brother Luke, he joined the so-called Paris Gang, of which Whistler, Edward Poynter, and George du Maurier were also luminaries. In fact he appears as "the Greek" in Trilby, du Maurier s romanticized account of the vie de boheme, published in 1894. Like his older brother Constantine (see cat. no. 111), Alecco was a passionate collector, and after taking over his parents' house, 1 Holland Park in north Kensington, on his marriage in 1875, he pro- ceeded to turn this conventional mid-Victorian mansion into one of the great Aesthetic houses of the day. The nearest par- allel was the house in Prince's Gate, which the Liverpool shipowner Frederick Leyland was currently decorating in comparable style with the help of many of the same artists. The conversion of 1 Holland Park was carried out by Philip Webb, the architect member of the Morris firm. William Morris himself was responsible for much of the decoration, while Walter Crane devised an elaborate scheme of gesso work for the dining room, and Thomas Jeckyll, the begetter of Leyland's ill-fated Peacock Room (now in the Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C.), designed the Japanese billiards room. In addition to paintings by Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Watts, Whistler, Legros, Fantin-Latour, and others, the house contained Greek vases, Tanagra statuettes, Persian pottery, Chinese porcelain, Japanese lacquer, bronzes, majolica, and tapestries. The whole assemblage illustrated the "harmony of complexity," and had the "splendour of an old silk rug." 3 Alecco Ionides owned four works by Burne-Jones, all of moderate size and dating from about the same period. They hung in two drawing rooms on the first floor, where they formed an important element in a decorative scheme to which Morris gave a distinctly Persian flavor, emphasizing blues and greens and covering nearly every surface with delicate floral patterns. He himself designed the carpet, wallpaper, curtains, and ceiling decoration. In one corner stood a grand piano designed by Burne-Jones and richly decorated in gesso by Kate Faulkner (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), while Chinese plates and Iznik tiles hung above the pictures and other rare ceramics were displayed in cabinets. It is conceivable that Burne-Jones altered the background of Ionides s version of Pan and Psyche, introducing green meadows and feathery trees, to make it harmonize better with its decorative setting. Any such decision, however, is unlikely to have been the out- come of Morris's involvement with the scheme, since he did not start work on the house until 1880, some years after the pic- ture was probably finished. 4 Ionides sold the picture a year before his death in 1898, and it passed, via Burne-Jones's dealers, Agnews, into the posses- sion of Robert Henry Benson (1850-1929). A financier whose name lives on in that of the banking house Kleinwort Benson, formed by merger in 1961, Benson had two mentors as a col- lector. One was his father-in-law, Robert Stayner Holford, the Maecenas of Dorchester House, who, with the aid of almost unlimited wealth, formed one of the greatest collections to be put together during the Victorian era. The other, in some ways more important, was Burne-Jones s patron William Graham, whose son, Rutherford, was Benson's contemporary at Balliol College, Oxford. Under Grahams influence, Benson concen- trated on two closely related fields in which Graham himself had specialized, the work of the Italian Old Masters and that of Burne-Jones. In fact, a number of Benson s pictures of both kinds had once belonged to Graham, whose collection was sold in 1886. The exhibition includes one of these (cat. no. 113), as well as another Benson picture (cat. no. 119) which, like Pan and Psyche, does not have a Graham provenance. Benson's own collection was dispersed in the 1920s, both before and after his death in April 1929. His Italian Old Masters were bought en bloc in 1927 by Sir Joseph Duveen for £500,000. Duveen took them to America for sale, and many are now among the most prized possessions of the country's public collections. [jc] 1. Memorials, vol. 2, p. 333. 2. Letters in Houghton Library, Harvard University, quoted in Fogg Art Museum 1946, pp. 35-36. 3. Gleeson White, "An Epoch -Making House," Studio 12 (November 1897), PP- "1-12. 4. See William Morris, (exh. cat., London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1996), pp. 144-45, I 53~54> nos - 1.16-18.
Signed lower left EBJ Fitzwilliam work list : 1865...Designed 70 subjects from the story of Cupid and Psyche 1869 ... designed Pan and Psyche If Burne-Jones has taken to heart the blue iris as signifying a message or messenger as identified by Phillips (1825) in his Floral Emblems and since they occur in paintings which allude to the situation between himself and Maria, then this painting may well be a reference to their skirmish on the banks of the Serpentine. The painting would therefore be some sort of consolation as the wretched Psyche ( Maria) is being rescued by Pan ( Burne-Jones). and was offered as a conciliatory gesture by the artist to his lover.
16 June 1895 The E.B.J "Pan and Psyche" (195) is quite a different picture to the "Garden of Pan" which you saw at Agnews' which was sold for £3000. The "Pan and Psyche" (195) was mezzotinted by Campbell and there is a good photo by Hollyer.2 These are two pictures but both are equally good, I prefer the landscape in this one which I believe to be the first, as it is slightly smaller.3 E.B.J's pictures are apt to grow! The "Briar Rose" (188) is one of the many instances. That series began designs for tiles some 34 years back, I have the first sketches for them. The "Pan and Psyche" is a much smaller picture than "Garden of Pan," I consider 1800 guineas quite reasonable, 2. cf. note 5 to letter 50 (The version of the engraved mezzotint by C.W. Campbell in 1886 is now in the Fogg Museum but the version belonging to Ionides and exhibited at the Goupil Gallery was apparently not engraved.) 3. Murray must be referring to the two versions of Pan and Psyche here. Ionides version was slightly smaller than the Fogg version and its background was a rolling landscape whereas the Fogg version has a rocky landscape in its background. De Lisle dates them both 1867-1874. The Garden of Pan is much larger than either and over 10 years later in date.
14 December 1896 The "Pan and Psyche" (195) can also be still be had for £1000, this is also cheap, at Gopils £1500 was asked. The background is different to the one that Hollyer photographed, being an open wooded landscape instead of bare rock. I imagine you have that photo.