BURNE-JONES
Unexpectedlyand suddenly, from an attack ofangina pectoris, following upon the pest of influenza, Sir Edward Burne-Jones died yesterday morning. He was sixty-five years old, and he looked worn for his age—a man of delicate appearance, and certainly of great sensitiveness; yet, as it had seemed already, of much staying power,—a ‘creaking gate,’ as his friends thought, not so very regretfully, since destined, in all probability, to ‘hang long.’ But now his work and life have been arrested; the laborious days which he had lived for forty years of manhood are for ever over, and the wan face of the untiring craftsman, which bent eagerly over his task, and brightened with quick sensibility in the relaxation of the social hour, is for ever still. ‘Finis’ is written to the volume of achievement of one of the greater practitioners in what we may call the second generation of the English Pre-Raphaelites.
Of the first Pre-Raphaelites—of those of the firstgeneration—more than one changed his ways, his work, his whole conception of Art, obviously, as time went on, and the most illustrious of them all—Millais—was far enough removed from a Pre-Raphaelite in the end. But of that distinguished and untiring practitioner of the second generation, whose hold, of late years at least, upon the English and to some extent upon the French public has become phenomenal, though it will not be constant, it is certainly to be noted that although there was, at different times, an unequal capacity, there was at no time visible change in the direction of his tastes or in the method of his work. Of the human figure Burne-Jones was not at the first an excellent, and was never, at any time, an absolutely faultless draughtsman. Yet the poetry of his figure-drawing, the almost feminine tenderness with which he followed the lines of dainty human movement, the dreamy grace that was in the place of strength, the elegant diffuseness, so to say, which was characteristic of his style—never even by accident tense and terse—these things are noticeable in his earlier water-colours and in the very latest of his performances in this year’s New Gallery. It was as a water-colour painter that he first began to be known. A pupil of Rossetti, as far as he was a pupil of any one, Burne-Joneswas from the beginning romantic, and he was affluent in colour.
But what, it may be asked, are the especial characteristics of Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s art, as it has been revealed not only in the designs for painted glass, mosaic, tapestry, in numberless pages decorated with beautiful ornament—such as the Morris translation of Virgil, and later, the great Chaucer—but likewise in the series of large pictures, the adequate display of which was, so to say, one of theraisons d’êtreof the old Grosvenor Gallery? He had indeed extraordinary individuality. He was amenable to influence, for all that; and the influence he felt the most—that of his true fellows—was exercised by the Italians of the earlier Renaissance: a period scarcely primitive, scarcely accomplished. Those early Italians, though engaging, were not really great draughtsmen of the human figure—not great draughtsmen in the sense of the Greek sculptors, or Michael Angelo, or Raphael, or Ingres, or Leighton, or Bouguereau. Sir Edward Burne-Jones, lacking the peculiar education which fitted the temperament and brought out the qualities of the men we have named last of all, not unnaturally sympathised with those in whom intention counted sometimes for more than execution. But it must not be thought thatbecause the ever-inventive artist did not possess the Academic qualities, he was not, therefore, in certain respects, very remarkable in draughtsmanship. He drew with the ease of conversation; and, though never a master of accurate gesture—seldom dramatic in the representation of the particular hour or scene—he was a master of quaint and simple, and sometimes of elaborate, grace; and for the untiring record of the particular type of maidenhood, seen best perhaps in the ‘Golden Staircase,’ or in ‘Venus’s Looking-Glass,’ he stands alone. We name those pictures rather than, for instance, the ‘Days of Creation,’ or any of his various ‘Seasons,’ because in them he is at his happiest—his girls, though in the work of the suave decorator they are never essentially various, can be radiant as well as doleful. His men have plenty of wistfulness, but they have rarely energy, strength, decision. They are even, in a measure, sexless. And of childhood, Burne-Jones has never been an inspired, or even, it would seem, a particularly interested chronicler.
Of course, it must be remembered that Burne-Jones is judged unjustly when judged by the rules of even the least narrow realism. He painted, not the world of our own day, or of any day—least of all the Kensington in which he lived, and slept, andhad his studio—but a world he had imagined and created; a world his conception of which was fed, no doubt, by the earlier and graver of mid-Italian art. Imagination, now stimulated by legend, now supported by classic lore, and now the product of the brooding of an isolated mind—that is really the genesis, theraison d’être, the Alpha and the Omega of his art. Burne-Jones had, at his best, and especially in his middle period—the days of the ‘Chant d’Amour,’ with its fitly welcomed splendours of crimson and blue and golden brown—a wonderful gift of colour; and, even where the draughtsmanship of the human figure left something to be wished for, he was a marvellous, a loving, and a patient draughtsman of flower and of herb. The backgrounds of some of his inventions, in landscape and the architecture of towns, were of strange and mystic quaintness. Sometimes, in these, he recalled almost the spirit, the mystery, almost the charm, of the backgrounds of the prints by Albert Dürer. The great Dürer!—well, that is saying much. But we have left to the last what was perhaps Burne-Jones’s most essential characteristic, certainly his greatest accomplishment. We mean his gift of composition of line, his power of precisely and perfectly filling, and never overcrowding, the space it was his businessto occupy. His composition of light and shade was less remarkable. He was a master of agreeable outline, of flowing and spontaneous tracery. But if it is not his imagination which is to keep his memory green, in the minds of the students of Art—and we doubt whether, with all his very individual merits, it really is—then it is that in which, in all our generation, and perhaps in all our English School, he may be accounted to have most possessed—the humbler faculty of patterning, of weaving faultless webs of subtle line over the surface, large or small, which was devoted to the exposition of whatever chanced to be his theme.
(Standard, 18th June 1898.)