Last fall, I happened to find myself in Princeton, N.J., with a few hours to kill. Having discovered that the only secondhand bookshop in town had closed, I headed for the Princeton Art Museum. En route, I stopped at the university library, which had mounted a wonderful exhibition of William Hogarth’s 18th-century satirical prints — “Marriage a la Mode” and “A Rake’s Progress,” among others — and, naturally, I figured that would be the highlight of the day. I was wrong.
In the museum, almost in a corner, I came upon a tall stained-glass panel designed by Edward Burne-Jones. It was of St. Cecilia, patron saint of music, dressed in blue. Her face — with that soulful, ethereal look we associate with the Pre-Raphaelites in general and Burne-Jones in particular — was so serenely beautiful that I stood there, transfixed. I finally tore myself away to continue my tour of the other galleries, but, five minutes later, found myself drawn back to stare some more. A quarter-hour later, the guards announced that it was closing time.
More from Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
Archive
(Harvard University Press) - “The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination” by Fiona MacCarthy.
During his lifetime, Burne-Jones’s art frequently had this mesmerizing effect on people. The girls and women he portrayed in his pictures, as well as the pictures themselves, were “stunners.” With eyes like deep pools, collagen lips and great masses of hair, these iconic beauties can be seen on dust jackets and posters to this day. Think back, for instance, to A.S. Byatt’s “Possession,” which attracted many initial buyers just because of its striking cover: Burne-Jones’s “The Beguiling of Merlin.”
Any new biography of Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) starts off in the shade of Penelope Fitzgerald’s beautifully written life, published in 1975. Fiona MacCarthy is no match for Fitzgerald on a sentence-for-sentence basis — but who could be, given that Fitzgerald was one of the finest novelists of the 1980s and early ’90s? But MacCarthy makes up for this through her unrivaled knowledge of that thread of English painting and decoration we think of as the Arts and Crafts movement (and its later descendants). She has, for instance, written standard books about the great polymath William Morris, the Bloomsbury group’s Omega Workshops and the influential stone-cutter, type designer and printmaker Eric Gill.
In her preface to “The Last Pre-Raphaelite,” MacCarthy sums up Burne-Jones as “the licensed escapist of his period, perpetrating an art of ancient myths, magical landscapes, insistent sexual yearnings, that expressed deep psychological needs for his contemporaries.” She underscores that he strongly believed “in the power of art to counteract the spiritual degradation, the meanness and corruption he saw everywhere around him in the ruthlessly expansionist, imperialistic Britain” of the 19th century.
Little wonder, then, that the artist’s most famous paintings, tile works, drawings and tapestries illustrate scenes from romantic legends (“Pygmalion,” “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid,” “Cupid and Psyche”); Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur” (“The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon,” “The Arming and Departure of the Knights of the Round Table on the Quest for the Holy Grail”); fairy tales (“Briar Rose,” “Beauty and the Beast”); and Chaucer (the illustrations for the coveted Kelmscott Press edition of the poet’s works). Two of his best-loved paintings — “Green Summer” and “The Golden Stairs” — are group portraits of young girls in flower, in the latter case of virtually angelic figures descending a series of winding steps.
Loading...
Comments