Inspired by ‘stunners’, honoured by posterity

DESCRIBED as “the first major biography in 35 years of the greatest British artist of the late 19th century” this handsome volume is far more than that, and provides a wide-ranging introduction not only to late 19th century art in Britain but also to key figures in the Arts and Crafts movement such as William Morris.

The book runs to 625 pages of well researched and clear, lucid, well-written prose. There are detailed descriptions of Burne-Jones’s friends, his journeys to Italy, his marriage and family life; and above all his art — the hundreds of stained glass windows he designed, and his many lustrous oil paintings replete with beautiful but vacant-eyed ‘stunners’ — the beautiful women who were to serve as muses, and models, for the artist throughout his career. Burne-Jones’s canvases, inspired by artists of the Renaissance such as Mantegna and Piero della Francesca, epitomise much of the greatness — and oddness — of Victorian England. MacCarthy recounts the artist’s childhood in Birmingham where he was born in 1833. His mother having died in childbirth, Burne-Jones grew up with his father, who struggled to make a success of a framing shop. Illness and adversity left both father and son equally unable to cope with the world. Burne-Jones reacted by burying himself in books, demonstrating a precocious talent at sketching portraits from an early age. He developed a dependence on women, and a fixation on an ideal of female beauty, that would last his entire life.

“Passionate Brompton”, or “PB”, the shorthand used to describe Burne-Jones and the other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle into which he was a late entry, described those poets, musicians and painters who spent their lives in pursuit of aesthetic beauty. It was an movement that was simultaneously derided and admired. However in 1875, when a department store named Liberty’s opened on Regent Street, selling Indian silk fabrics and Arts and Crafts furnishings, it was an instant success, showing that what had started out as a small art movement, was rapidly becoming a popular social phenomenon. Burne-Jones was satirised in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience, as epitomising the “greenery-yallery Grosvenor Gallery foot-in-the-grave young man” of the Aesthetic Movement. The young Oscar Wilde, satirised in the play, created a stir at the Grosvenor Gallery, when he arrived at the inaugural exhibition in May 1877 wearing a coat he had designed, in the form of a cello.

Burne-Jone’s rise, from relatively obscure beginnings in Birmingham, to becoming the lion of London art world, attracted catty comments even from his fellow artists. In 1881 Dante Gabriel Rossetti complained that Burne-Jones’s style of conversation was ‘getting beyond the pussy-cat and attaining the dicky-bird’ and when Burne-Jones bought a house near Brighton, Rossetti remarked ‘He appears to be culminating’.

Burne-Jones was indeed moving in the highest political and social circles. One important patrons was Arthur Balfour, later to become Chief Secretary of Ireland. Balfour may have been a Conservative MP, but he was also a connoisseur of art and an intellectual. He was one of ‘the Souls’, a loose-knit group of aesthetes who met at country house parties. However there was little of the aesthete evident in Balfour’s resistance to changes in the landlord system in Ireland. For Balfour’s house at Carlton Gardens, Burne-Jones painted canvases on the theme of Perseus, in which the search for beauty is contrasted with moral degradation and squalor.

What Burne–Jones achieved as an artist was remarkable. He managed to create work that, while echoing the greatness of Greek and Roman art, and inspired by early Renaissance work, was unmistakably the art of his own times, when the industrial revolution had created immense wealth.

However, in spite of technological development, wider changes in society had lagged behind, and women were relegated to a secondary role. Burne-Jones took advantage of this, in an endless series of unrequited love affairs with beautiful young women, who duly appeared in his paintings, inadvertently — or perhaps deliberately — depicted as hopeless, forlorn, doe-eyed, and needful of a strong male to look after them.

Burne-Jones spent his life pursuing, and painting, this illusion, one that was subscribed to by church leaders, universities, politicians and the law. Throughout his brilliant career he never deviated from what was essentially an adolescent, and skewed, view of the world, and yet he was also close friend and confidant of the novelist George Eliot, a woman extremely unlikely to entertain dolts.

Burne-Jones’s genius was to express two things in visual form. The first was an aspiration to inherit the greatness of ancient Greece and Rome, and the second was an inescapable oddness of Victorian male attitudes towards women and sexuality.

Burne-Jones’s wife Georgiana came from a Methodist family. Her early attempts to establish herself as an artist were quickly suppressed by the dismissive remarks of the Pre-Raphaelite men, and not least by their champion John Ruskin, who advised Georgie to keep the house neat and tidy first, and make sure the children were happy, before beginning any of her own artwork.

In the meantime, the men-folk pursued ‘stunners’ through the streets of London, in the hopes of discovering the perfect ideal of female beauty. Unsurprisingly, the burden was too much for some. Marriages disintegrated, affairs caused rifts, and Rosetti’s wife Lizzie Siddal died of an overdose of laudanum.

MacCarthy allows brief discussion of the question that arises from even the most cursory examination of Burne-Jones’s art and life. Here was an artist obsessed with young women, and often with women who were too young. While MacCarthy lightly dismisses this as something held in common with all the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it is an aspect of their art that goes to the heart of Victorian England, where innocence and beauty, and the pursuit of aesthetic pleasures amongst a social elite, contrasted with the reality of cramped and poor living conditions of millions of workers in industrial cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool.

Paradoxes abound in Burne-Jones’s life. While he spent his life rejecting the commercial output of factories and foundries, and painted instead scenes evoking the guileless innocence of late-Medieval Italian art, it was the wealthy industrialists and capitalists who vied to purchase his artistic output, and he obliged by producing not only scores of paintings, but literally hundreds of designs for stained glass.

The windows designed by him, and fabricated by Morris, Faulkner and Co, can be found in churches, institutions and private houses throughout Britain and Ireland. In St Carthage’s Cathedral in Lismore, two tall lancet windows with depictions of “Justice” and “Humility”, surmounted by a roundel depicting the angel on the day of judgement, commemorate Francis Currey, the estate agent at Lismore during the Famine years who is remembered for the good works he did during that time. In many ways, it is Burne-Jones’s stained glass windows that are his most successful works of art, the glow of light coming through the coloured glass making them more ethereal, and in keeping with the other-wordliness of his subject matter.

The author Fiona MacCarthy, who is renowned for her excellent biographies of artists such as Eric Gill and Stanley Spenser, has often revealed creative geniuses to have had feet of clay. Burne-Jones survives her searching examination of his life and works, and comes through as an artist who rightly deserves respect and admiration, but whose eternal search for a more moral and innocent world seems at variance with his entering the highest circles of imperial power, and with his unceasing craving for worldly success and material wealth.

The Irish connections with Burne-Jones extend to more than his stained glass windows in Irish churches; near Baltimore in West Cork, his great-granddaughter Georgie maintains the beautiful gardens at Inish Beg House, a more recent homage to the power of beauty in nature.

*Peter Murray is director of the Crawford Municipal Gallery in Cork.