Portfolio.
BURNE-JONES.   THE GOLDEN STAIRS.
(By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, owner of the copyright.)

Everything that Burne-Jones has created is at once fragrant, mystical, and austere, like this picture. His range of subject is most extensive. In his Princess Alfred Tennyson had quickened into new life the legends of chivalry, and in his Idylls of the King the tales of the Knights of the Holy Grail. Swinburne published his Atalanta in Calydon, in which he exercised once more the mysterious spell of the ancient drama, while he created in Chastelard, Bothwell, and Mary Stuart a trilogy of the finest historical tragedies ever written, and showed in Tristram of Lyonesse that even Tennyson had not exhausted all the beauty in old legends of the time of King Arthur; while, as early as 1866, he had given to the world his Poems and Ballads, dedicated to Burne-Jones. In these works lie the ideas to which the painter has given form and colour.

He paints Circe in a saffron robe, preparing the potion to enchant the companions of Ulysses, with a strange light in her orbs, while two panthers fawn at her feet. He represents the goddess of Discord at the marriage-feast of Thetis, a ghastly, pallid figure, entering amongst the gods who are celebrating the occasion, and holding the fateful apple in her hand. He depicts Pygmalion, the artist King of Cyprus, supplicating Aphrodite to breathe life into the sculptured image of a maiden, the work of his own hands.

Apart from classical antiquity, he owes some of his inspiration to the Bible and Christian legends, the sublimity of their grave tragedies, and the troubled sadness of their yearning and exaltation. One of his leading works devotes six pictures to the days of creation. An angel—accompanied in every case by the angels of the previous days—carries a sphere, in which may be seen the stars, the waters, the trees, the animals, and the first man and woman, in their proper sequence. The scene of the “Adoration of the Kings” is a landscape where fragrant roses bloom in the shadow of the slender stems of trees, which rise straight as a bolt. The Virgin sits in their midst calm and unapproachable, and in her lap the Child, who is more slender than in the pictures of Cimabue. The three Wise Men—tall, gigantic figures, clad in rich mediæval garments—approach softly, whilst an angel floats perpendicularly in the air as a silent witness.

In his picture “The Annunciation” Mary is standing motionless beside the great basin of a well-spring, at the portico of her house. To the left the messenger of God appears in the air. He has floated solemnly down, and it seems as if the folds of his robes, which fall straight from the body, had hardly been ruffled in his flight, as if his wings had scarcely moved; with the extremities of his feet he touches the branches of a laurel. Mary does not shrink, and makes no gesture. There they stand, gravely, and as still as statues. The robe of the angel is white, and white that of the Virgin, and white the marble floor and the wainscoting of the house; and it is only the pinions of the heavenly messenger that gleam in a golden brightness. A picture called “Sponsa die Libano” bore as a motto the words from The Song of Solomon: “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.” The bride, in an ample blue robe, walks musing beside a stream, upon the bank of which white lilies grow, whilst the vehement figures of the North and South Winds rush through the air in grey, fluttering garments.

In addition to his love for Homer and the Bible, Burne-Jones has a passion for the old Trouvères of the Chansons de Geste, the great and fanciful adventures of vanished chivalry, Provençal courts of love, and the legends of Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table. His “Chant d’Amour” is like a page torn out of an old English or Provençal tale. On the meadow before a mediæval town a lady is kneeling, a sort of St. Cecilia, in a white upper-garment and a gleaming skirt, playing upon an organ, the full chords of which echo softly through the evening landscape. To the left a young knight is sitting upon the ground, and silently listens, lost in the music, while a strange figure, clad in red, is pressing upon the bellows of the instrument. “The Enchantment of Merlin,” with which he made his first appearance in 1877, illustrated the passage in the old legend of Merlin and Vivien, relating how it came to pass one day that she and Merlin entered a forest, which was called the forest of Broceliande, and found a glorious wood of whitethorn, very high and all in blossom, and seated themselves in the shadow: and Merlin fell asleep, and when she saw that he slept she raised herself softly, and began the spell, exactly according to the teaching of Merlin, drawing the magic circle nine times and uttering the spell nine times. And Merlin looked around him, and it seemed to him as though he were imprisoned in a tower, the highest in the world, and he felt his strength leave him as if the blood were streaming from his veins.

In other pictures he abandons all attempt to introduce ideas, confining himself to the simple grouping of tender girlish figures, by means of which he makes a beautiful composition of the most subtle lines, forms, colours, and gestures. The “Golden Stairs” of 1878 was a picture of this description: a train of girls, beautiful as angels, descended the steps without aim or object, most of them with musical instruments, and all with the same delicate feet and the same robes falling in beautiful folds. In this year he also produced “Venus’ Looking-glass”: a number of nymphs assembled by the side of a clear pool at sunset, in the midst of a sad and solemn landscape, are kneeling by the water’s edge together, reflected in its surface.

BURNE-JONES.THE WOOD NYMPH.
(By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright.)

Besides these numerous canvases, mention must be made of the decorative works of the master. For the English church in Rome, Burne-Jones has designed decorations in a rich and grave Byzantine style, and in England, where mural decoration has little space accorded to it in churches, there is all the more comprehensive scope for painting upon glass. Until the sixties church windows of this kind were almost exclusively ordered from Germany. The court depôt of glass-painting in Munich provided for the adornment of Glasgow Cathedral from drawings by Schwind, Heinrich Hess, and Schraudolph, and for the windows of St. Paul’s from designs by Schnorr, while Kaulbach was employed for a public building in Edinburgh. In these days Burne-Jones reigns over this whole province. Where the German masters handled glass-painting by modernising it like a Nazarene fresco, Burne-Jones, who has penetrated deeply into the mediæval treatment of form, created a new style in glass-painting, and one exquisitely in keeping with the Neo-Gothic architecture of England. His most important works of this description are probably the glass windows which he designed for St. Martin’s Church and St. Philip’s Church in Birmingham, his native town. These labours of his in the province of Gothic window-painting explain how he came to his style of painting at the easel: he habituated himself to compose his pictures with the architectonical sentiment of a Gothic artist. Forced to satisfy the requisitions of the slender, soaring Gothic style, he came to paint his tall, straight-lined figures, the composition of which is not triangular in the old fashion, but formed in long lines as in vertical church windows.

It is not difficult to find prototypes for every one of these works of his. His sibyls recall Pompeii. His church decoration would never have arisen but for the mosaics of Ravenna. And those angels in golden drapery with grave, hieratical gestures in the pictures of the Trecentisti influenced him in his “Days of Creation.” Other works of his suggest the Etruscan vases or the suavity of Duccio. “Laus Veneris” has the severe classicality of Mantegna saturated with Bellini’s warmth of hue. The “Chant d’Amour,” in its deep splendour of colour, is like an idyll by Giorgione. And often he heaps together costly work in gold and ivory like the Florentine goldsmith painters Pollajuolo and Verrochio. Many of his young girls are of lineal descent from those slender, flexible, feminine saints of Perugino, painted in sweeping lines and planted upon small flat feet. Often, too, when he exaggerates his Gothic principles and gives them eight-and-a-half or nine times the proportion of their heads, they seem, with their lengthy necks and slim hands fit for princesses, like younger sisters of Parmigianino’s lithe-limbed women; while sometimes their movements have a more ample grace, a more majestic nobility, and their lips are moved by the mystical inward smile of Luini, so unfathomably subtle in its silent reserve. But it is Botticelli who is most often brought to mind. Burne-Jones has borrowed from him the fine transparent gauze draperies, clinging to the limbs and betraying clearly the girlish forms in his pictures; the splendid mantles, flowered and adorned with dainty patterns of gold; the taste for Southern vegetation, for flowers and fruits, and artificial bowers of thick palm leaves or delicate boughs of cypress, which he delights in using as a refined and significant embellishment; from Botticelli he has borrowed all the attributes with which he has endowed his angels—rose-garlands and vases, tapers and tall lilies; even his type of womanhood has an outward resemblance to that of the Florentine, with its long, delicate, oval face framed in wavy hair, its dreamy eyes and finely arched brows, its dainty and rather tip-tilted nose, and its ripe, delicately curving mouth slightly opened. Indeed, Burne-Jones’s painting is like one of those gilded flower-tables where plants of all latitudes mingle their tendrils and their foliage, their bells and their clusters, their perfume and their marvellous glory of colour, in a harmony artificially arranged. In its strained archaism his art is an affected, artificial art, and would perish as swiftly as a luxuriant exotic plant, had not this pupil of the Italians been born a thoroughbred Englishman, and this Botticelli risen from the grave become a true Briton on the banks of the Thames.