Unexpectedly and suddenly, from an attack of _angina 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 first generation--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-Jones was 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 the _raisons d’être_ of 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 that because 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, and had 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, the _raison 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 business to 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.)