Читать книгу Edward Burne-Jones - Frances Spalding - Страница 14

Only two people very much in love could have looked with confidence at the Russell Place rooms. They had not even been tidied since Ned left, the water-supply was poor – Poynter, who lived there afterwards, had to save water by washing up in a slop-basin – and there were no chairs. The only reliable article of furniture was a solid oak table made at the Boys’ Home in Euston Road,¹ which is still in family use. But Mrs Catherwood did not forget their love of music, and sent a small plain walnut piano. Burne-Jones set to work to decorate this.

His idea was to make the decoration answer to the music itself. What he liked best were stringed instruments (‘the rumble of the ’cello comforts my belly,’ he said),² accompanied voices, and as soon as he had a chance to hear it, ‘old Italian music’ – Carissimi and Stradella. His reaction, he said, was ‘entirely emotional’. The little piano shows Death on the left-hand side, corresponding to the two bass octaves; his face is hidden by a veil. On the right there are seven seated girls, in olive, brown and white, listening to a stringed instrument for the extreme treble. Whereas Death is crowned and veiled, the girls are simplified into rounded shapes, but the two parts are connected by the feeling that Death also is listening to the music; at some point the girls will realise that he is only a step away. Determined that Georgie’s piano should not fade like the Union murals, Ned used lacquer and deepened the colour with a red-hot poker. In the event, the colour lasted longer than the works of the piano. The decoration does not ‘represent’ music but is an exact equivalent of the piano’s music, just as Browning’s Galuppi is the equivalent of the toccata which made him ‘feel chilly … I grow old’.

Georgie’s singing was not at all ambitious. She set Rossetti’s Song of the Bower to a waltz, and Keats’s In a drear-nighted December to Beethoven’s piano sonata Op. 10, No. 2, and, if the company felt like it, she would sit at the little piano until two or three in the morning, lending a charming air of spirited respectability to their bohemian evenings.

Possibly the red-hot poker was suggested by a new friend, William de Morgan, who, although he did not start experimenting in pottery glazes till the 1870s, was always a great deviser of dodges. De Morgan at this time was only just out of the Academy schools, and it was he and Burne-Jones between them who were accused by the outspoken little maid of losing the key of the beer barrel; amazing that there should be a little maid at all, when Mrs Beeton, in 1861, gives £150 p.a. as the correct income for employing a maid-of-all-work (and a girl occasionally). Another view of Russell Place is given by the young George du Maurier, recently arrived from Paris, and introduced by Val Prinsep: his visit made his dream of ‘five o’clock tea with stunning fellows chatting with Emma [his fiancée]’, and a piano ‘rendered of untold value by my important paintings’. Georgie, who felt that it was ‘well to be amongst those who painted pictures and wrote poetry’, was glad to welcome two poets among her callers, even though, until some rush-bottomed chairs arrived, she had to receive them sitting on the table; the poets were Allingham and Swinburne. William Allingham, the author of the Day and Night Songs where Ned had seen Rossetti’s illustrations to the Maids of Elfenmere, now wrote his fairy poems from the safe employment of a customs officer in Lymington. He was serious and sensitive, ‘talking of Christianity, Dante, Tennyson and Browning’. Later in life he became finical and difficult, was obsessed with germs, refused to touch door-handles, and had to be forcibly got up and dressed, though his Anglo-Irish charm never faded. But whereas Allingham, in 1860, was a presentable mid-Victorian version of a poet, Swinburne had to be accepted by his hosts as a kind of fiery freak or phenomenon, who at the end of the evening would be extinguished by drink and had to be sent home, labelled, in a cab, or, as Rossetti put it, ‘describing geometrical curves on the pavement’. He was still only twenty years old. In such a creature a capacity for affection is an added danger, and Swinburne’s friends could be divided into those who were and were not good for him. He was sympathetic to young married couples, nesting peacefully in their happiness. He amused both Janey Morris and Lizzie Siddal: the Memorials record that when in this same year, 1860, they went to the theatre ‘in our thousands’ it was Lizzie who declared that the boy selling playbooks was frightened at seeing her own red hair at one end of the row and Swinburne’s at the other: ‘good Lord, there’s another of ‘em!’ This is one of Lizzie’s few recorded remarks, and one can feel in the story Georgie’s affection for them both, heightened by her excitement at going to a theatre at all.

The description given in the Memorials is startlingly vivid, and conveys the shock of pure beauty which Georgie felt when Lizzie took off her bonnet in the upstairs room of their Hampstead lodgings, and shook out the gleaming folds of the famous hair. As a minister’s daughter, Georgie could see the best in everyone and get on passably with most, but she loved Rossetti’s wife. To Georgie was written the most touching of Lizzie’s remaining letters, sending ‘a willow pattern dish full of love to you and Ned’.³

In spite of the confusion, the beer barrel and Georgie’s dressmaking, Burne-Jones felt a physical release and a new ability to work. His two real apprentice pieces, which mark the beginning of an individual style, are the Sidonia and Clara Van Bork, now in the Tate Gallery. Sidonia the Sorceress, in a translation published in 1849 of William Meinhold’s Sidonia Von Bork, die Klosterhexe, was the book which Rossetti had been pressing upon all his followers. ‘You seem mighty scandalised about Sidonia – I have never read the book,’ Ruskin wrote to Ellen Heaton. ‘Edward only told me that she was a witch.’ Although Malcolm Bell calls it a ‘most entrancing novel’, it is not at all like Sintram, having the strong savour which pleased Rossetti, and Ned may have hesitated before finding a scene for illustration. One can hardly imagine his Sidonia dancing, as she does in the book, on the coffin of her suffocating sister to drown her feeble cries, or fighting off the sexual assaults of the courtiers ‘with hands and feet’. They are two grave little water-colours, in which Burne-Jones selected the incident of the bees which try to reach Sidonia’s golden hair through its net, and her gentle sister Clara carrying a nest of young doves.

For Sidonia’s oddly-patterned dress he studied a portrait of Isabella d’Este at Hampton Court; the galleries there, open to the public since 1830, were a centre for all students of art – Sass took his school there in a body, making them take off their hats before the Raphael cartoons. But for the deep blacks and shadowed whites, Burne-Jones made his first attempt at imitating the colour of the Arnolfini.

When they were finished, Ned, anxious to help with the troubles in Birmingham, wrote to his father to make frames to them. But even these two frames, for pictures about one foot by six inches, taxed Mr Jones to the uttermost. Asked to make a mirror with roundels, like the one in the Arnolfini portrait, he faltered, and although it appears in Fair Rosamund and Queen Eleanor, it had to be returned to his workshop, where it stayed, the ends never quite meeting. However, the Sidonia, with its frame, went to Mr Plint in time for Christmas that year.

How were the young Joneses supported? We have seen the kindness of Rossetti and Ruskin in recommending possible buyers (not always successfully: Miss Ellen Heaton of Leeds, for instance, flatly refused the early Cupid’s Forge which Ruskin pressed upon her). There were Mr Plint’s small cheques; there was an element of sheer chance – once Ned found half a sovereign unexpectedly at the bottom of his waistcoat pocket. It never occurred to Georgie, brought up in a trusting and praying household, to worry about how their wants would be supplied. To Ned, on the other hand, money worries had been familiar ever since he could walk and talk, yet there was a certain lightheartedness. ‘Never say “bill” – it’s a coarse word,’ he once told Mary Gladstone.⁴ He had been poor and unhappy; now he was poor and happy.

For country air, Ned and Georgie were welcome at Red House, the new home ‘strongly built of red brick’ which Philip Webb had designed for Morris and which was now ready for visitors. It was in an old apple orchard at Upton, in Kent, ten miles out of London, and it was not for nothing that in Morris’s last romance, published in the year of his death, the heroes return to ‘the little hills of Upmead’. Here, from the moment the wagonette met them at Abbey Woods station, Morris and his friends were happy together. Almost anyone was welcome who thought as he did about the crafts. Morris, Ned, Faulkner, Rossetti, Lizzie, and any other visitor immediately set to work at painting the ceiling – never to be quite finished – with red, blue and green diaper patterns; they also, of course, decorated the furniture, though the Red Lion settle and wardrobe were already in place. Janey embroidered hangings, Georgie had brought her engraving tools. In the afternoon the girls jaunted about in the pony trap (Janey had been brought up among horses) exploring Chislehurst common. Ned didn’t care for these expeditions: ‘I hate the country – apples alone keep me in good spirits,’ he wrote to his father; but he gloried in the wine, the practical jokes, and the feeling of hard work together. His paintings of Morris and Janey in the Wedding of Sire Degrevaunt, underneath the gallery from which the guests flung apples at their host, have still not quite faded from the walls.

Evening was the time for music and hide-and-seek (Janey and Georgie were still only nineteen) and Ned said that he had seen Janey laugh ‘until, like Guinevere, she fell under the table’. In his graceful red chalk sketches for further decorations, Janey is seen in her long mediaeval dress, putting her arms round her husband’s neck from behind. This reminds us that all the young wives were in unfashionable dresses of gathered serge or linen; they had leather belts and embroidered collars and cuffs, in some cases designed by Morris himself.

Although Rossetti tended to laugh at the red brick and told Webb that architects were ‘only tradesmen’, he too was expansive and genial. In their seasons the apples and roses came, and in their season came three pregnancies: Lizzie Rossetti, Janey Morris and Georgie Jones were all expecting babies in 1861.

As a matter of necessity, the Burne-Joneses moved into a larger set of rooms at 62 Great Russell Street. Ned, however, now had the prospect of plenty of work, for in the spring the firm of Morris Marshall, Faulkner & Co. had opened business. Boyce’s diary records that he took his ‘future’, Miss Subeiron, for a musical evening at Russell Square (26 January 1861) and ‘[Jones] talked of a kind of shop where they would jointly produce and sell painted furniture’. The ‘shop’ opened at 8 Red Lion Square, where a basement was rented for workshops and a tile and pottery kiln. Charlie Faulkner acted as book-keeper, and Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Madox Brown and Philip Webb were the other original members. The firm was created partly for practical reasons – Morris needed to make more money – partly for emotional ones, to prolong the joy in shared work which they all felt at the Red House; and partly on principle, to realise Ruskin’s attack in The Stones of Venice on ‘servile ornament’ and to bring into the Victorian revival of the useful arts the spirit of the mediaeval workshop. In this spirit everyone lent a hand. Georgie quietly put aside her attempts at wood-engraving and began to paint tiles, Janey supervised the embroidery, and a foreman, George Campfield, was found at the Working Men’s College.

A call of £1 per share was made upon the partners, but Burne-Jones earned his contribution back immediately with four tile designs at five shillings each and he received five shillings for attendance at each meeting. For the first time he began to keep accounts, in two little parchment-bound notebooks. Though they are not always accurate, and not always added up right, they record one side of his life from 1861 until 1897, the year before his death. They begin with a pen-and-ink drawing of Morris resplendent as Judas in a stained-glass window, while on the opposite page a thin Burne-Jones stands on a barrel-shaped Morris in the gutter. Throughout the notebooks Ned complains, in the margin, of poor payment and overwork, of Morris’s unreasonable conduct, of his pretended stinginess and real fondness for a glass, or several glasses, of good wine. The two friends are playing out the comic rôles which they had fallen into almost as soon as they met. Then, with Morris’s death, all jokes cease.

‘We have many commissions’, Ned wrote to Crom Price, who was now trying his luck as a tutor in Russia, ‘and shall probably roll in yellow carriages by the time you come back.’ There was nothing amateur about the firm, even if it was experimental. They were up against stiff competition: the public were used to Burges’s solid furniture and the designs of Owen Jones and Butterfield; the South Kensington Exhibition of 1862 would provide a testing ground which might mean their failure or success. As a show piece for this they collaborated on what Ned’s workbook calls ‘painted gold cabinet for Seddon’ – the King René cabinet – and this panel, which also exists in a water-colour and a stained-glass version, is as sumptuous in its red, gold and grass-green as the other two, by Rossetti and Madox Brown. His earnings at the beginning were certainly not high: he got £8 for the Virgin and Child