PLATE VII.—DANAE (The Tower of Brass)(Glasgow Corporation Art Gallery)Like the "Sibylla Delphica" this canvas shows how Burne-Jones was accustomed to treat subjects from the classic myths in the mediæval spirit to which he inclined by habit and association. In his illustration of a subject from the story of Danae, where she stands watching in wonder the building of the tower of brass which was to be her prison, he has looked at Greek tradition in a way that was partly his own and partly a reflection of William Morris; but the result is none the less persuasive because it does not conform to the Greek convention.
(Glasgow Corporation Art Gallery)
Like the "Sibylla Delphica" this canvas shows how Burne-Jones was accustomed to treat subjects from the classic myths in the mediæval spirit to which he inclined by habit and association. In his illustration of a subject from the story of Danae, where she stands watching in wonder the building of the tower of brass which was to be her prison, he has looked at Greek tradition in a way that was partly his own and partly a reflection of William Morris; but the result is none the less persuasive because it does not conform to the Greek convention.
His election as an Associate of the Royal Academy came in 1885. That he coveted this particular distinction can scarcely be said; indeed, he was at first unwilling to accept it, and it was only in response to a personal request from Leighton that he finally decided to take his place in the ranks of the Associates. But he exhibited a picture at Burlington House in 1886, "The Depths of the Sea," and then, feeling that his work was unsuited for the Academy galleries, he sent nothing else there, and in 1893 resigned his Associateship. His contributions to the Grosvenor Gallery in 1886 were "The Morning of the Resurrection,""Sibylla Delphica," and "Flamma Vestalis"; and in 1887 "The Baleful Head," "The Garden of Pan," and some other canvases.
After this year he ceased to exhibit at the Grosvenor Gallery, as he was one of the chief members of the group of artists who supported Mr. Comyns Carr and Mr. C. E. Hallé in the founding of the New Gallery, and he sent there nearly all the works he produced during the rest of his life. The most important exceptions were the magnificent "Briar Rose" series of pictures, which were shown in 1890 by Messrs. Agnew at their gallery in Bond Street, and "The Bath of Venus," which went straight from the artist's studio to the Glasgow Institute in 1888.
The first exhibition at the New Gallerywas opened in 1888, and it included several of his oil-paintings, among them "The Tower of Brass," an enlarged repetition of an earlier picture, and two canvases, "The Rock of Doom" and "The Doom Fulfilled," from the "Story of Perseus" series, to which also belonged "The Baleful Head," shown in the previous year. To the succeeding shows there he sent much besides that can be taken as representing his soundest convictions. There were the large water-colour, "The Star of Bethlehem," and the "Sponsa di Libano," in 1891; "The Pilgrim at the Gate of Idleness" and "The Heart of the Rose" in 1893; "Vespertina Quies" and the oil version of "Love among the Ruins" in 1894; "The Wedding of Psyche" in 1895; "Aurora" and "The Dream of Launcelot at the Chapel of the San Graal" in 1896;"The Pilgrim of Love" in 1897; and "The Prioress' Tale" and "St. George" in 1898. In all of these his consistent pursuit of definite ideals, his love of poetic fantasy, and his admirable perception of the decorative possibilities of the subjects he selected are as evident as in any of his earlier works; as years went on he relaxed neither his steadfastness of purpose nor his sincerity of method. To the last he remained unspoiled by success and unaffected by the popularity which came to him in such ample measure—it may be safely said that with his temperament and his artistic creed he would have continued on the course he had marked out for himself even if the effect of his persistence had been to rouse the bitterest opposition of the public, and he was as little inclined to trade on his success as hewould have been to tout for attention if his efforts had been ignored.
There was no waning of his powers as his career drew towards its close. It was not his fate to be compelled by failing vitality to be content with achievements that lacked the force and freshness by which the work of his vigorous maturity was distinguished, for he died before advancing years had begun in any way to dull his faculties. Only a few weeks after the opening of the 1898 exhibition at the New Gallery he was seized with a sudden illness, which had a fatal termination on the morning of June 17. Really robust health he had never enjoyed, and on several occasions serious breakdowns had hampered his activity; but his devotion to his art was so sincere, and his determination so strong, that these interruptions didnot perceptibly affect the continuity of his work. Towards the end of his life, however, he suffered from an affection of the heart, and the demands which he made upon his strength helped, no doubt, to exhaust his vitality. At the time of his death he was striving to complete one of the most important and ambitious pictures he ever planned—"Arthur in Avalon," a vast canvas which, even in its unfinished condition, must be reckoned as an amazing performance, and worthy of a distinguished place in the record of modern art.
One of the most interesting things in the life-story of Edward Burne-Jones is the manner of his advance, within some twenty years only, from a position of obscurity to one of exceptional authority in the British school. The young student, who in 1855had just discovered his vocation and was beginning to feel his way under the guidance of Rossetti, had become in 1877 one of the most discussed of British artists, and had with dramatic suddenness entered into the company of the greatest of the nineteenth-century painters. With no effort on his part to attract attention, without having recourse to any of those devices by which in the ordinary way popularity is won, he secured, practically at the first time of asking, all that other men have had to strive for laboriously through a long period of probation. Although the few things he exhibited while he was a member of the Royal Water Colour Society were sufficient to rouse in the few real judges a deep interest in his future achievement, it was the singular merit of his contributions to the first exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery that made him instantly famous. The wider public realised then, and realised most forcibly, that he was an artist to be reckoned with, and that his work, whether people liked it or not, could by no means be ignored.
PLATE VIII.—THE ENCHANTMENTS OF NIMUE(South Kensington Museum)Painted, like the "Sidonia von Bork," while Burne-Jones was still under the influence of Rossetti, "The Enchantments of Nimue" is interesting as an example of his earliest methods. It was finished in 1861, but it was not exhibited until 1865, when it was hung in the Gallery of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours; it was bought for the South Kensington Museum in 1896. The painting shows how Nimue "caused Merlin to pass under a heaving-stone into a grave" by the power of her enchantments.
(South Kensington Museum)
Painted, like the "Sidonia von Bork," while Burne-Jones was still under the influence of Rossetti, "The Enchantments of Nimue" is interesting as an example of his earliest methods. It was finished in 1861, but it was not exhibited until 1865, when it was hung in the Gallery of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours; it was bought for the South Kensington Museum in 1896. The painting shows how Nimue "caused Merlin to pass under a heaving-stone into a grave" by the power of her enchantments.
From that time onwards there was for him no looking back. The twenty years of preparation, which were spent mainly in ceaseless seeking after completer knowledge and in careful study of the practical details of his profession, were followed by another twenty years of strenuous production, in which he worked out more and more effectively the ideas formed in his extraordinarily active mind. In the series of his paintings there is a very perceptible advance year by year in technical facility, but to suggest that they show also a growth of imaginativepower would scarcely be correct, because there seems to have been no moment in his career when he did not possess in fullest measure the faculty of poetic invention and the capacity to put his mental images into an exquisite and persuasive shape. What he acquired as a result of his exhaustive study was a closer agreement between mind and hand, the skill to convey to others what he himself felt. But he had no need to labour to make his intelligence more keen or his fancies more varied; nature had endowed him with a temperament perfectly adapted for every demand which he could make upon it in the pursuit of his art.
That he did not at first secure the unanimous approval of art lovers is scarcely surprising. The markedly individual artist who cares nothing for popular favour andis more anxious to satisfy his own conscience than to gather round him possible clients is never likely to become a favourite offhand. Burne-Jones by the brilliancy of his ability silenced all opposition long before his death, and gained over the bulk of the doubters who questioned his right to the admiration he received when he first began to exhibit at the Grosvenor Gallery. But for some while the unusual character of his art caused it to be much misunderstood by people who had not taken the trouble to analyse his intentions. He was accused of affectation, of deliberate imitation of the early Italians; he was attacked for his indifference to realism and for his decorative preferences. Even the genuineness of his poetic feeling was suspected, and his love of symbolism was ridiculed as the aberration of a warped mind.Much of this misconception was cleared away by the collected exhibition of his works which was held at the New Gallery in the winter of 1892-1893, for this show, by bringing together the best of his productions and by summing up all phases of his practice, proved emphatically that he had been as sincere and logical in his aims as he had been consistent in his expression. It was no longer possible to attack him out of mere prejudice; the verdict given fifteen years before on his art by those who understood him best was seen to be just. When a second collection was shown at the New Gallery—a memorial exhibition arranged in 1898, a few months after his death—few people remained who were prepared to dispute his mastery.
It is fortunate that justice should havebeen done to him by his contemporaries and that there should have been really so little delay in the wider acknowledgment of his claims. If appreciation had been withheld from him while he lived, if it had been his fate to secure only a posthumous reputation, there would have been some diminution of his influence, and his art would have lost some of its authority. But as a right estimate of his position was arrived at during his lifetime, when he was at the height of his activity as an exponent of an exceptionally intelligent æsthetic creed, he was able to make his beliefs effective in bringing about the conversion of a large section of the public to a truer understanding of the value of decorative qualities in pictorial art. He proved emphatically that decoration does not imply,as is popularly supposed, the abandonment of the characteristics which make a picture interesting; he showed that a subject can be legitimately treated so that it engages fully the sympathies of the average man, and yet can be kept from any descent into obviousness or commonplace conventionality. The painted story in his hands was no trivial anecdote; it was a motive by means of which he conveyed not only moral lessons but artistic truths as well, something didactically valuable but at the same time capable of appealing to the senses with exquisite daintiness and charm.
Indeed, he can best be summed up as a teacher who clothed the lessons of life with noble beauty and with dignity that was commanding without being forbidding. There was human sympathy in everythinghe painted—a tender, gentle sentiment which escaped entirely the taint of sentimentality and which, tinged as it always was with a kind of quiet sadness, never became morbid or unwholesome. He was too truly a poet to dwell upon the ugly side of existence, just as he was too sincerely a decorator to insist unnecessarily upon common realities. That he searched deeply into facts is made clear by the mass of preparatory work he produced to guide him in his paintings, by the enormous array of drawings and studies which he executed to satisfy the demand he made upon himself for exactness and accuracy in the building up of his designs. But in his studies, as in his pictures, the intention to express a personal feeling is never absent. He selected, modified, re-arranged as his temperament suggested;he omitted unimportant things and amplified those which were of dominant interest; he sought for what was helpful to his artistic purpose and passed by what would have seemed in wrong relation, consistently keeping in view the lesson which he desired to teach. It can be frankly admitted that a certain mannerism resulted from his way of working, but this mannerism was by no means the dull formality into which many artists descend when they substitute a convention for inspiration; it was rather a revelation of his personality and of that belief in the rightness of his own judgment which counts for so much in the development of the really strong man. Except for the short time in which he was influenced by Rossetti, his life was spent in illustrating an entirely independent view of artisticresponsibilities; and it would be difficult now to question this independence with the wonderful series of his paintings available to prove how earnestly and how seriously he strove to realise his ideals in art.
The plates are printed byBemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and LondonThe text at theBallantyne Press, Edinburgh