Edward Burne-Jones, edited by Alison Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Edward Burne-Jones by Alison Smith Mark Stocker (bio) Edward Burne-Jones, edited by Alison Smith; pp. 224. London: Tate Publishing, 2018, £40.00, £23.00 paper. Although Alison Smith’s edited volume, Edward Burne-Jones, which accompanied a major Tate Britain exhibition between 2018 and 2019, is noticeably shorter than Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer (1998), it provides equally valuable and updated insight into a figure regarded by John Pope-Hennessy as “one of the three greatest British artists of all time” (Learning to Look: My Life in Art [Doubleday, 1991], 13). While it sensibly refrains from duplicating the biographical emphasis of the magisterial accounts by Penelope Fitzgerald and Fiona MacCarthy, it can be appreciated primarily as a book rather than a multiple-entry catalog. There are nine chapters, six of which relate more closely to the exhibits, examining such themes as draftsmanship, series paintings, and design. The overview by Elizabeth Prettejohn confirms her formidable reputation as a thoughtful revisionist of Victorian art, stating boldly what more timid apologists had till now tentatively or dimly thought. The term apologist is used deliberately; it still appears tiresomely necessary to defend Burne-Jones from the brickbats of prominent mainstream media critics who cannot take him, or indeed Pre-Raphaelitism, seriously, reflecting the Englishness of damning English art. Prettejohn argues that Burne-Jones was sui generis and asks rhetorically, “Is there any other important artist of the nineteenth century who received a university education and never attended an art school? Is there, indeed, any other artist of the entire western tradition . . . who was educated entirely as an intellectual and not as a practitioner?” (14). Roger Fry may appear a valid rival, but after graduating from Cambridge he undertook more sustained training, and even the most ardent Bloomsburyite would not consider him an artist of the same caliber. Perhaps a better candidate is Burne-Jones’s lifelong friend, the architecturally trained William Morris. Both resolved to become artists through sheer force of will and before they knew that they had any special talent for it. For both men the vocation filled a vital intellectual and emotional void left by their abandonment of formal Christian beliefs. As Prettejohn states, “exact thinking . . . may have destroyed [Burne-Jones’s] belief in any particular doctrine, but it gave him an analytical habit that is crucial to understanding his art” (16). This helps explain why he painted what he did, resulting in a more intellectual art than almost any of his contemporaries, French impressionists and Victorian subject painters alike. Indeed, the outcome is something culturally closer to the comparative mythology and comparative religion of James Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Gilbert Murray. Prettejohn even offers the persuasive claim that “Burne-Jones’s pictorial storytelling seems to epitomise what we now call ‘intertextuality’” (17). [End Page 138] Burne-Jones’s lack of conventional training was reflected in how he blurred media. This could be interpreted negatively, as when his archrival James Whistler wittily quipped, “didn’t I always say that the man knew nothing about painting. . . . They take his oils for water-colours and his water-colours for oils” (31). Yet for Burne-Jones’s admirers it is precisely “they” who are at fault and miss out on the dry, hard, otherworldly beauty of his crafted creations. In her essay on Burne-Jones’s techniques, Alison Smith answers Whistler by addressing the innovatively “intermedial nature of Burne-Jones’s art” (30). Smith and others stress the point—also emphasized by the Tate Britain installation— that Burne-Jones approached his art “as a form of craft rather than a professionalised activity” (23). Even major paintings that clearly asked to be considered as fine art also presented themselves as akin to wall furnishings, such as The Legend of the Briar Rose (1885–90) installed in the saloon at Buscot Park. The Burne-Jones aesthetic lent itself to astonishingly versatile cross-media application, and here he ranks with John Flaxman before him and Eric Gill after as underrated British geniuses of Gesamtkunstwerk, works of art combining multiple forms in one. Thus a further chapter besides Suzanne Fagence Cooper’s “Burne-Jones as a Designer,” might have been desirable. In...