Queer Places:
12 Bennetts Hill, Birmingham B2 5RS, UK
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
17 Red Lion St, London WC1R 4PF, UK
41 Kensington Square, London W8 5HP, UK
Samuel Richardson House, North End Rd & North End Crescent, London W14 8TA, UK
Prospect Cottage, The Green, Rottingdean, Brighton BN2 7HA
St. Margaret's Churchyard
Rottingdean, Brighton and Hove Unitary Authority, East Sussex, England
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet, ARA (28 August, 1833 – 17 June, 1898) was a British painter and designer associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which included
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Millais, Ford Madox Brown and William Holman Hunt. To Charles Eliot Norton,
Harvard’s (and America’s) first professor of fine arts, Paul Ruskin’s friend,
and himself the leading art arbiter in America of his time,
Oscar Wilde wrote:
“I am in Boston for a few days and hope you will allow me the pleasure of
calling on you.” Doubtless Wilde enclosed his letter of recommendation to
Norton from the Pre-Raphaelite master Edward Burne-Jones (“any kindness shown
to him is shown to me”).
Burne-Jones worked with William Morris as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co in the design of decorative arts.[2]
Burne-Jones's early paintings show the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but by 1870 he had developed his own style. In 1877, he exhibited eight oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery (a new rival to the Royal Academy). These included The Beguiling of Merlin. The timing was right and Burne-Jones was taken up as a herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement.
In the studio of Morris and Co. Burne-Jones worked as a designer of a wide range of crafts including ceramic tiles, jewellery, tapestries, and mosaics. Among his most significant and lasting designs are those for stained glass windows the production of which was a revived craft during the 19th century. His designs are still to be found in churches across the UK, with examples in the US and Australia.
Born Edward Coley Burne Jones (the hyphenation of his last names was introduced later) was born in Birmingham, the son of a Welshman, Edward Richard Jones, a frame-maker at Bennetts Hill, where a blue plaque commemorates the painter's childhood. A pub on the site of the house is called the Briar Rose in honour of Burne-Jones' work.[2] His mother Elizabeth Jones Coley died within six days of his birth, and Edward was raised by his father, and the family housekeeper, Ann Sampson, an obsessively affectionate but humourless, and unintellectual local girl.[3][4] He attended Birmingham's King Edward VI grammar school in 1844 and the Birmingham School of Art from 1848 to 1852, before studying theology at Exeter College, Oxford.[5] At Oxford, he became a friend of William Morris as a consequence of a mutual interest in poetry. The two Exeter undergraduates, together with a group of Jones' friends from Birmingham known as the Birmingham Set,[6] formed a society, which they called "The Brotherhood". The members of the brotherhood read the works of John Ruskin and
Tennyson, visited churches, and idealised aspects of the aesthetics and social structure of the Middle Ages.[2] At this time, Burne-Jones discovered Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur which would become a substantial influential in his life. At that time, neither Burne-Jones nor Morris knew Dante Gabriel Rossetti personally, but both were much influenced by his works, and later met him by recruiting him as a contributor to their Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, founded by Morris in 1856 to promote the Brotherhood’s ideas.[7][8]
Burne-Jones had intended to become a church minister, but under Rossetti's influence both he and Morris decided to become artists, and Burne-Jones left college before taking a degree to pursue a career in art. In February 1857, Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott:
Two young men, projectors of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, have recently come up to town from Oxford, and are now very intimate friends of mine. Their names are Morris and Jones. They have turned artists instead of taking up any other career to which the university generally leads, and both are men of real genius. Jones's designs are marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequalled by anything unless perhaps Albert Dürer's finest works.[7]
In 1856 Burne-Jones became engaged to
Georgiana "Georgie" MacDonald, one of the MacDonald sisters. She was training to be a painter, and was the sister of Burne-Jones's old school friend. The couple married in 1860, after which she made her own work in woodcuts, and became a close friend of
George Eliot. (Another MacDonald sister married the artist Sir Edward Poynter, a further sister married the ironmaster Alfred Baldwin and was the mother of the Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin, and yet another sister was the mother of Rudyard Kipling. Kipling and Baldwin were thus Burne-Jones's nephews by marriage).
Georgiana gave birth to a son, Philip, in 1861. In the winter of 1864, she became gravely ill with scarlet fever and gave birth to a second son who died soon thereafter. The family then moved to 41 Kensington Square, and their daughter Margaret was born there in 1866.[9]
In 1867 Burne-Jones and his family settled at the Grange, an 18th-century house set in a garden in North End, Fulham, London. For the 1870s Burne-Jones did not exhibit, following a number of bitterly hostile attacks in the press, and a passionate affair (described as the "emotional climax of his life")[10] with his Greek model Maria Zambaco, which ended with her trying to commit suicide by throwing herself in Regent's Canal.[10][11]
During these difficult years Georgiana developed a friendship with Morris, whose wife Jane had fallen in love with Rossetti. Morris and Georgie may have been in love, but if he asked her to leave her husband, she refused. In the end, the Burne-Joneses remained together, as did the Morrises, but Morris and Georgiana were close for the rest of their lives.[12]
In 1880, the Burne-Joneses bought Prospect House in Rottingdean, near Brighton in Sussex, as their holiday home and soon after, the next door Aubrey Cottage to create North End House, reflecting the fact that their Fulham home was in North End Road. (Years later, in 1923, Sir Roderick Jones, head of Reuters, and his wife, playwright and novelist Enid Bagnold, were to add the adjacent Gothic House to the property, which became the inspiration and setting for her play The Chalk Garden).
His troubled son Philip, who became a successful portrait painter, died in 1926. His adored daughter Margaret (died 1953) married John William Mackail (1850–1945), the friend and biographer of Morris, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1911 to 1916. Their children were the novelists Angela Thirkell and Denis Mackail, and the youngest, Clare Mackail.
In an edition of the boys' magazine, Chums (No. 227, Vol. V, 13 January 1897), an article on Burne-Jones stated that "....his pet grandson used to be punished by being sent to stand in a corner with his face to the wall. One day on being sent there, he was delighted to find the wall prettily decorated with fairies, flowers, birds, and bunnies. His indulgent grandfather had utilised his talent to alleviate the tedium of his favourite's period of penance."
Burne-Jones was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1885, and the following year he exhibited uniquely at the Academy, showing The Depths of the Sea, a painting of a mermaid carrying down with her a youth whom she has unconsciously drowned in the impetuosity of her love. This picture adds to the habitual haunting charm a tragic irony of conception and a felicity of execution which give it a place apart among Burne-Jones's works. He formally resigned his Associateship in 1893.
One of the Perseus series was exhibited in 1887 and two more in 1888, with The Brazen Tower, inspired by the same legend. In 1890 the second series of The Legend of Briar Rose were exhibited by themselves and won admiration. The huge watercolour, The Star of Bethlehem, painted for the corporation of Birmingham, was exhibited in 1891.
A long illness for a time checked the painter's activity, which, when resumed, was much occupied with decorative schemes. An exhibition of his work was held at the New Gallery in the winter of 1892–1893. To this period belong his comparatively few portraits.
In 1894, Burne-Jones was made a baronet. Ill-health again interrupted the progress of his works, chief among which was the vast Arthur in Avalon. William Morris died in 1896, and the health of Burne-Jones declined substantially after. In 1898 he suffered an attack of influenza, and had apparently recovered when he was again taken suddenly ill, and died on 17 June 1898.[13][31] His memorial service was held six days later, at Westminster Abbey. His ashes were interred d in the churchyard at St Margaret's Church, Rottingdean.[32]. In the winter following his death, a second exhibition of his works was held at the New Gallery, and an exhibition of his drawings at the Burlington Fine Arts Club.[13]
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