The subject of one of the artist's most famous paintings comes from an Elizabethan ballad in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and used by Tennyson for a poem of sixteen lines, "The Beggar Maid," published in 1842. Burne-Jones made a first, unsatisfactory attempt at an oil in 1861-62 (Tate Gallery, London) and seems to have taken up the idea again with designs in a sketchbook datable to about i875. I Two watercolors (one originally dated 1883) show further resolution of the composition, but have the figures close together, with the beggar maid looking away shyly; in both, the choristers are singing lustily. 2 Work on the final canvas took up most of the winter of 1883-84; as was his custom, Burne-Jones made a cartoon (cat. no. 113), on which he could simultaneously work out matters of detail and color. This shows some inter- esting changes, such as the virtual elimination of the strong sunlight streaming in from the left, Burne-Jones choosing in the oil to darken the interior space and use the beggar maid's pale skin as a focus of lightness. According to the ballad, the king shared Pygmalion's view of women — "He cared not for women-kinde, / But did them all disdaine" — but fell in love at first sight with a beautiful young beggar "all in gray / The which did cause his paine." Tennyson simply describes their meeting, ending his poem with Cophetua's oath, "This beggar maid shall be my queen!" while Burne-Jones seems to illustrate a passage in the older narrative, in which the beggar (identified as Penelephon) sits speechless in awe within the royal palace: The king with curteous comly talke This beggar doth imbrace: The beggar blusheth scarlet red, And straight again as pale as leade, But not a word at all she said, She was in such amaze. Even the young attendant singers, who provide a foil to the immobility of the main figures, are engrossed and silent, enhancing the impression of timelessness, of a moment frozen within an atmosphere of unspoken romantic feeling. The influence on the composition of Andrea Mantegna's Madonna della Vittoria (1495-96; Musee du Louvre, Paris) has been noted, as well as that of Carlo Crivelli's Annunciation of 1496 (which Burne-Jones would have seen at the National Gallery), and here a similar use of heavily foreshortened planes, gradually receding upward through a rather implausi- ble architectural space, is cleverly disguised with a variety of cloths, shadows, and exotic decorative details of a vaguely Assyrian kind (in the ballad, Cophetua is called African, giv- ing Burne-Jones the opportunity to offset his dark skin against Penelephon's white limbs). The passage in the immediate fore- ground, showing the near- abstract reflections of the sculpted reliefs, may be compared to similar work in Pygmalion and the Image (cat. no. 87a). A distant crepuscular landscape glimpsed through the upper door not only affords an ingenious sec- ondary light source but acts also as a reminder of the outside world from which the beggar maid has come, both appearing in simple, refreshing contrast to the king's opulent surround- ings. The beggar maid holds a bunch of anemones, symbol of unrequited (here, perhaps unsought) love, underlining the emotional tension of the scene. Burne-Jones encountered some difficulties during his long winter of work on the painting. He worried especially over the girl's dress; several drapery studies, including two in oil and chalk of the full figure, 3 testify to his indecisiveness, described in a letter of November 1883 about whether "to put on the Beggar Maid a sufficiently beggarly coat, that will not look unappetizing to King Cophetua, — that I hope has been achieved, so that she shall look as if she deserved to have it made of cloth of gold and set with pearls. I hope the king kept the old one and looked at it now and then." 4 For the figure of the king there is a superb large life study from the nude model, now at Birmingham. 5 Cophetua's shield and crown (the latter used also in the Briar Rose series [cat. nos. 55-58] and The Sleep of Arthur inAvalon [fig. 107]) were painted from actual pieces of metalwork, made to the artist's design by W. A. S. Benson. 6 Despite the demands of other work, as well as more welcome interruption — Henry James took John Singer Sargent to see its progress 7 — the painting was finally finished in the spring of 1884, Burne-Jones writing to his friend Madeleine Wyndham on April 23: "This very hour I have ended my work on my pic- ture. I am very tired of it — I can see nothing any more in it, I have stared it out of all countenance and it has no word for me. It is like a child that one watches without ceasing till it grows up, and lo! It is a stranger." 8 All his effort was repaid, however, by the picture's success at the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition in 1884, where, in Malcolm Bell's words, it "assured finally the painter's claim to the high- est place in English art, and convinced even the most obstinate carpers of his unequalled powers." 9 The Art Journal praised the "glowing eastern colour" of the undoubted "picture of the year." "It is the idea," its critic concluded, "the inspiration of this pic- ture which makes it so fine, and raises it to the level of the work of the great masters of a bye-gone age." 10 F. G. Stephens, writ- ing in the Athenaeum, also admired the artist s command of color: "The whole of this magnificent picture is glorious in the fulness of its dark rich tints of gold, azure, black, bronze, crim- son, olive, brown, and grey, each colour of which comprises a thousand tints and tones exquisitely fused and subtly graded. Technically speaking, this picture is far more complete, better Edward Burne-Jones, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, ca. 1883. Watercolor, 2872 x 14V2 in. (72.4 x 36.8 cm). Private collection drawn, more solidly painted, more searchingly finished, and more impressively designed than any we have had from the painter before." 11 The Times declared that it was "not only the finest work that Mr Burne-Jones has ever painted, but one of the finest ever painted by an Englishman." 12 This view would be shared by a European audience five years later, when the painting was sent to the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Whereas The Beguiling of Merlin (cat. no. 64) had appealed in 1878 largely to a group of informed critics, King Cophetua proved so universally popular in France that Burne- Jones was awarded the cross of the Legion d'honneur, and a vogue for his painting began that was to last well into the new century. Writing soon after the artist's death, the Anglophile critic Robert de la Sizeranne recalled visitors leaving the "machine" section of the Exposition, and how "we found our- selves in the silent and beautiful English Art section, and we felt as though everywhere else in the Exhibition we had seen nothing but matter, and here we had come on the exhibi- tion of the soul." Discovering King Cophetua, "it seemed as though we had come forth from the Universal Exhibition of Wealth to see the symbolical expression of the Scorn of Wealth. All round this room were others, where emblems and signs of strength and luxury were collected from all the nations of the world — pyramids, silvered or gilt, represent- ing the amount of precious metal dug year by year out of the earth; palaces and booths con- taining the most sumptuous products of the remotest isles — and here behold a king laying his crown at the feet of a beggar- maid for her beauty's sake! ... It was a dream — but a noble dream — and every young man who passed that way, even though resolved never to sacrifice strength to right, or riches to beauty, was glad, nevertheless, that an artist should have depicted the Apotheosis of Poverty. It was the revenge of art on life." 13 The Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff (1858— 1921) also remarked on the influence of the painting, which left its viewers "enwrapped by this living atmosphere of dream -love and of spiritualised fire." 14 The painting was eventually bought for the nation in 1900, by public subscription, from the executors of the Earl of Wharncliffe. This greatly pleased Georgiana Burne-Jones, who had "always thought this picture contained more of Edward s own qualities than any other he did." 15 It remains in its original frame, one of the most spectacular of the Venetian Renaissance aedicular type favored by the artist. 16 1. For the oil of 1861-62, see Taylor 1973, fig. 3; the com- positional studies are described in Robinson 1973. 2. Taylor 1973, fig. 4, and Sotheby's, June 19, 1990, lot 65. A simpler design in pencil, placing the atten- dants on either side above, is in the National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff (Harrison and Waters 1973, fig. 201). There is also a half-size version in oils of the final design (6o 5 /s x 28 in. [154 x 71 cm]; sold at Sotheby's, June 20, 1989, lot 84). 3. Both in the Tate Gallery, London, reproduced in Taylor 1973, figs. 5, 7. 4. Memorials, vol. 2, pp. 134-35. 5. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery (black chalk on brown paper, 230*04), where there are also three pencil studies for the king holding the crown (P73"75'7 2 )- A study for the head of one of the young singers, in the same medium, is also at Birmingham (22i'o4); a similar study of the other boy's head (dated 1882, and modeled from Philip Comyns Carr, son of one of the directors of the Grosvenor Gallery) was sold at Christie's, November 6, 1995, lot 69. 6. Illustrated, along with other items, in Vallance 1900, figs. 42, 52. 7. Henry James to Elizabeth Boott, June 2, 1884, in Henry James; Letters, edited by Leon Edel, vol. 3, 1883-1895 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 43. "Sargent enjoys and appreciates [Burne-Jones's] things in the highest degree," James noted, "but slightly narrow B.J. suffers from a constitutional incapacity to enjoy Sargent's — finding in them 'such a want of finish.'" To James's mind, King Cophetua was "his finest thing, and very beautiful and interesting." 8. Memorials, vol. 2, p. 139. Previously Burne-Jones had written, "I torment myself every day — I never learn a bit how to paint . . . but I will kill myself or else Cophetua shall look like a King and the beggar like a Queen, such as Kings and Queens ought to be" (quoted in Hartnoll 1988, p. 36). 9. Bell 1892 (1898), p. 57. 10. Art Journal, June 1884, p. 189. n. Athenaeum, May 3, 1884, p. 573. 12. Times (London), May 1, 1884, p. 4. Punch magazine issued a typically deflationary cartoon, in whose cap- tion the Mediaeval Royal Personage complains to the Pallid Maiden: "Oh I say, look here, you've been sitting on my crown," with the comment "Yes; and she looks as if she had, too, poor thing!" (May 24, 1884, p. 244). 13. Robert de la Sizeranne, "In Memoriam, Sir Edward Burne-Jones: A Tribute from France," Magazine of Art, 1898, p. 515; quoted in De Lisle 1904, pp. 1-2. 14. Fernand KhnopfT, "In Memoriam, Sir Edward Burne-Jones: A Tribute from Belgium," Magazine of Art, 1898, p. 520. 15. Memorials, vol. 2, p. 139. The painting hangs in the Tate Gallery, although Georgie's hope was that "it should be hung in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, to which his mind and soul constantly turned as a hallowed place while he was alive"; letter of August 7, 1899, to George Howard, quoted in Lago 1981, p. 120. 16. See Paul Mitchell and Lynn Roberts, A History of European Picture Frames (London, 1996), p. 19, fig. 7a, for an original frame of exactly this kind, including winged cherubs' heads (used for Girolamo da Santacroce's Virgin and Child with Saints Augustine and Peter, ca. 1512, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art).
Fitzwilliam work list: 1880 ... designed Cophetua 1881... Worked on the big picture of Cophetua 1883... made studies for Cophetua - also a finished cartoon of the same and began a small panel of it 1883 -1884... painted Cophetua from October of this year until the end of April next when it was finished. For the composition of the painting Burne-Jones relied heavily on Mantegna's painting The Madonna della Vittoria (Musée du Louvre), particularly in the profile of the King and his relationship with the maid. Also interesting to note that Burne-Jones also drew from the painting for Quia Multum Amavit from the architectural frame work and he used the Temptation relief as a basis for a few stained glass designs. A watercolour study for the picture ( private collection) has the beggar maid holding a spray of flowers which contains wheat - emblematic of riches ( Phillips: Floral Emblems 1825) which in the final painting are converted to anemones. At first sight Wildman is correct in quoting a verse from Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which is a literal description, but on reading Johnson's "Crown Garden of Goulden Roses" 1612, the impression given is that Cophetua is the victim to Cupid and that autobiographically interpreted, the painting implies that the artist had been a victim to fate and that on reflection, he was absolving himself of responsibility for his affair with Maria. From his standpoint in 1880 he was able to look back and feel less guilty. Penelophon's features are modelled upon those of Georgie. In comparison with the animation found in the paintings and drawings of Maria the stillness in this paintings is remarkable. Its structure based upon an "S" shape and the geometric forms contribute to an over-arching solemnity. At the age of 53, Burne-Jones was assessing his position and considering his relationships. The framework of the steps and the throne are decorated with reliefs modelled upon Assyrian examples which he had admired from his youth through visits to the British Museum and Layard's The Monuments of Ninevah (1849) In the Summer of 1850 a letter quoted in Memorials Vol 1 p 45 the young Burne-Jones describes a visit to the British Museum in which he noted an admiration for the "Nimroud or Assyrian room". "In most of the bas-reliefs the king forms the most prominent object. He is in some hunting the wild bull, in other pursuing his enemies, to whom he bears the most gigantic proportions, always accompanied by the 'feronher' or sacred bird, a kind of talisman." William Graham Letters 22nd may 1884 "... I wonder if it would be possible to have the Cophetua Cartoon at Grosvr. Place (even if incomplete) by the time Frances comes to us the middle of June? And I wish you would send me a note of the height and width you mean it to be framed tht I might see where to hang or stand it, but don't let it bother or hurry you if you would rather defer it. The above makes clear that the painting was intended to be stood on the floor to enable the viewer to be part of the scenario, the steps being an invitation to enter the painting. An intention confirmed by the inclusion of feet on the bottom of the frame still in existence.
The depiction of action came off awkwardly; realising his failure, Burne-Jones laid the work aside unfinished. When he took up the subject again, apparently around 1875, he settled on a different composition, a scene that featured in neither poem: a moment not yet reached in ‘The Beggar Maid’ and not actually described in the ballad, that of the king seated in his palace, gazing up in mute admiration at the beggar maid perched above him on his throne.15 Significantly, the inspiration for the new design appears to have been Mantegna’s Madonna della Vittoria [Figure 32], which Burne-Jones had first seen at the Louvre in 1855 and of which he is known to have possessed an engraving.16 But King Cophetua takes telling liberties with Mantegna’s design, placing the beggar maid higher than the Virgin and Cophetua at the viewer’s level, thus very much below the beggar maid and literally beneath her notice. When Burne-Jones exhibited the final version at the Grosvenor Gallery’s summer exhibition in 1884 (and it is worth noting in passing that the Grosvenor itself was often spoken of, whether reverentially or in jest, in religious terms, as a ‘temple of art’), Théodore Duret was less than impressed, complaining in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts that Burne- Jones’s choice of subject was symptomatic of the insularity and parochialism of British art (a criticism which, as we shall see, is unjustified).17 British critics, however, overwhelmingly hailed it as a masterpiece. Yet oddly, the major reviews skated over the work’s religious and potentially blasphemous overtones; most focused their attention on the figure of the king, whom the critic for the conservative Art Journal considered a salutary change of direction in Burne-Jones’s oeuvre, which had been dogged up until then by accusations of ‘morbidity’ and ‘unmanliness’: Can we in two lines tell of the high humility, the manliness, the chivalry of the noble figure, who, his crown in his hand, sits on the lowest step of the throne, on whose summit he has placed the beggar maid? His gaze is turned towards his love, a gaze of reverence, almost of adoration, for her simple beauty and purity. There is no feeling in Cophetua’s mind that he has bent down to this woman.18 15 See D. Robinson, Letter to the Editor, Apollo (May 1973), p. 626; Robinson dates the origin of the new composition to 1875 based on two sheets of sketches in the Fitzwilliam Museum. 16 W. S. Taylor, ‘King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid’, Apollo (February 1973), pp. 151-52. Burne-Jones’s debt to Mantegna was noted by at least two contemporary observers in France, Maurice Hamel and Jean Lorrain. 17 ‘Le sujet . . . même avec l’aide du catalogue reste incomprehensible à tout autre qu’un Anglais’: T. Duret, ‘Expositions de la Royal Academy et de la Grosvenor Gallery’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts (June 1884), pp. 534-35. 18 ‘London Spring Exhibitions: The Grosvenor and the Water-Colour Societies’, Art Journal (1884), p. 189 108 Rod (1887), pp. 177-95 and 399-416. 109 ‘Le Roi Cophetua, de Burne-Jones, inutilement agenouillé aux pieds de sa mendiante: enveloppée dans ses haillons sur le trône où l’amour l’a conduite, ses traits douloureux racontent sa longue souffrance, la proclamant impuissante à jouir du bonheur trop tard venu, et ses yeux, où flotte obstinément l’angoisse, disent qu’elle ne saura pas répondre aux extases de l’adorateur abîmé devant elle’, Rod (1890), pp. 29-30. Based on Rod’s description of La Chimère, it seems likely that he refers to the 1867 painting now in the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA (Mathieu 104) (see Mathieu, 1994, p. 101).