Edward Burne-Jones by Penelope Fitzgerald

Edward Burne-Jones by Penelope Fitzgerald

Author:Penelope Fitzgerald [Penelope Fitzgerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-04-21T04:00:00+00:00


The whole scene is to have four ‘golden pictures’ to link it up, and ‘pattern work’ (the design for this is the Tate Gallery), but this may prove too elaborate. Meanwhile he asks for £500 on account ‘as I might be in need of it’, so that he can go on with the job while Balfour came to The Grange to approve the sketches. But here the airy perfectionist had met his match. He waited a lifetime for his music room, but Burne-Jones, always on the verge of getting the design quite right, never finished it.

Watts also felt that Ned might benefit from a change of background. In August 1875, after the demolition of Little Holland House, Watts built the Iron House (also known as the Tin Pot) in the grounds of his new site in Melbury Road, and he invited Burne-Jones to share this new studio. Two large canvases with designs blocked in were delivered but never completed, and in fact they stayed there until the Tin Pot was taken down and only the two doors remained. A feeling was growing meanwhile among these people who were so used to getting things done – the Howards, the Prinseps, the Balfours – that Ned should show his pictures in public again – but where? Perhaps, as George Eliot suggested (3 March 1876), in a ‘separate little gallery’. This, of course, was not a problem for him alone. ‘Mr Burne-Jones is more than right not to exhibit,’ Watts wrote in 1875, disgusted with the poor arrangements at the Manchester Modern Art Exhibition. Graham was the person who could formerly have been relied upon to arrange such matters, but he was terribly broken down by the loss of his young son, poisoned in his school holidays by an overdose of medicine and dead in a few minutes in Frances’s arms. From this death Graham never quite recovered, but both he and Leyland were prepared to lend from their collections if a site could be found.

These plans to bring Ned out of seclusion into a confrontation with a new public were unexpectedly interrupted by a crisis which made them, for the time being, seem quite unimportant. For the first and last time in his life, Burne-Jones became interested in politics, and in the perpetual delusion that through political means we can better the human condition.



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