Was Burne-jones a reluctant radical?
The Radical Vision of Edward BurneJones
TAndrea Wolk Rager (Yale University Press, £45)
HE title of this book is, at first glance, a curious one. What exactly was radical about the medievalist, mystical and Michelangelesque paintings of the Pre-raphaelite Edward Burne-jones? They show a very Victorian dream world, comprising Arthurian legends, Classical mythology and Biblical incidents, all depicted in a style that draws on the Renaissance and earlier traditions. They are, without exception, otherworldly, escapist, even. The realms they conjure up seemingly have nothing to do with the age in which they were made.
According to the American art historian Andrea Wolk Rager, however, this reading misrepresents Burne-jones’s intent. His pictures, she says, are, in fact, veiled indictments of the ills of the time: from Imperialist expansion and the destruction of Nature to heedless capitalism and inequality.
In a letter written towards the end of his life to his friend Helen Mary Gaskell, Burne-jones (1833–98) defined his personal conception of what art should be: ‘I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a light better than any light ever shone —in a land no one can define or remember, only desire—and the forms divinely beautiful.’ The words that follow this declaration are usually left unquoted, ‘and then I wake up’. For the author, this means that Burne-jones saw his ‘beautiful romantic dreams’ as ephemeral states before the mundane world and its travails reasserts itself. What his paintings really represent is a ‘vehicle for revolutionary reawakening’.
Burne-jones shared many of his attitudes with his friend William
Morris, whom he met at Exeter College, Oxford. He quickly gave up the idea of becoming a minister for the career of an artist, through which he could embark on what he called a ‘crusade and Holy Warfare against the age, the “heartless coldness of the times”’.
Morris came from a comfortable background, but Birminghamborn Burne-jones, whose father was a frame-maker, knew something of suffering. His mother died six days after his birth, he lost a son to scarlet fever and his wife, Georgiana, fell in love with his best friend Morris. Burne-jones found some consolation with a Greek model, Maria Zambaco, and tried —and failed—to leave Georgiana for her. Maria’s response was to urge a joint suicide; she threw herself into the Regent’s Canal, from which the police rescued her amid much scandal.
Burne-jones’s work across numerous fields was, therefore, not simply a profession, but a necessary refuge from his private life.
When in 1885 he started on a series of paintings depicting ‘The Legend of Briar Rose’, which is discussed in detail in the book, he knew full well what it felt like to be trapped in the middle of an impenetrable, thorny thicket, dreaming of rescue.
Dr Wolk Rager discusses BurneJones’s endeavours across painting, illustration, the decorative arts and stained-glass design and sees in them the artist taking the long view. What he was offering, especially in his multi-work cycles such as his ‘Perseus’, ‘Pygmalion’ and ‘Briar Rose’ series, was not a quick fix, but an alternative to the modern world; these are images of what might be and amount to exhortations, albeit of a gentle kind.
It is a persuasive line of argument even if, standing before his works, it isn’t the one that springs to mind. More obvious is their sensuousness and adherence to the late-victorian cult of aestheticism and art for art’s sake. Certainly, Victorian England’s upper echelons sensed nothing subversive going on. Burne-jones was made a baronet in 1894—although his socialist convictions left him conflicted about accepting the honour—and, shortly after his death, largely thanks to the personal intervention of the Prince of Wales, a memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey—he was the first artist to be honoured in this way. These were marks of esteem that would not have come his way had he been suspected of wanting to recast the society that now honoured him. Burnejones was, perhaps, too subtle a radical to be an effective one. Michael Prodger
I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream