journey among French cathedrals, quickly proved too strong to be resisted; and by 1855 the desire to become an artist had, in Burne-Jones’s mind, crystallised into a resolve. He came up to London while still an undergraduate, was introduced by Mr. Vernon Lushington to Rossetti, was by him persuaded to abandon the thought of returning to Oxford, and at once began to learn to paint. Although we hear very little of any preliminary attempts or of any lessons from drawing-masters, it is certain that Burne-Jones already showed many of the developed gifts of an artist. For in February 1857, not much more than a year after their acquaintance began, Rossetti writes to William Bell Scott, ‘Two young men, projectors of the “Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” have recently come up to town from Oxford, and are now very intimate friends of mine. Their names are Morris and Jones. They have turned artists instead of taking up any other career to which the university generally leads, and both are men of real genius. Jones’s designs are marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequalled by anything unless perhaps Albert Durer’s finest works’ (W. B. Scott, Memoirs, ii. 37). During the year which preceded this letter, Burne-Jones, although not actually a pupil of Rossetti, had been constantly present in his studio in Blackfriars; had watched him working, and had experienced to the full his truly magnetic influence. It is not surprising, then, that his earliest works are little else than echoes, but rich and resonant echoes, of Rossetti; such a drawing, for instance, as that of ‘Sidonia von Bork,’ though executed four years later, might almost pass for one of Rossetti’s own achievements. From these early years there survive a certain number of works in various media; the earliest is a pen drawing of ‘The Waxen Image’ (1856), and in the next year come four designs for stained glass executed for the chapel at Bradfield. That autumn was given to Oxford, and to the heroic but ‘piecemeal and unorganised’ attempt to adorn the Union debating-room with frescoes, of which Burne-Jones contributed ‘Nimue and Merlin.’ In 1858 we find him painting some decorations in oil for a cabinet, and characteristically choosing an illustration from Chaucer; and in 1859, together with various pen drawings, and the beginning of the water-colour of ‘The Annunciation,’ comes the well-known St. Frideswide’s window in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. A crowded and elaborate design like this last shows already an immense advance; and from about the same year we have an example of Burne-Jones’s now remarkable, if here and there faulty, draughtsmanship in the large pen drawing of ‘The Wedding of Buondelmonte,’ a masterpiece of its kind. From this time, however, it is somewhat difficult to date the stages of his progress, on account of the habit, well known to his friends, and noticed by all his biographers, of beginning several pictures or series of pictures at the same time, taking them up as fancy might suggest, and sometimes leaving them for years unfinished. It is well to remember, as Mr. Malcolm Bell reminds us, that ‘the great “Wheel of Fortune,” designed in 1871, was begun in 1877, but was not finished till 1883. . . . “The Feast of Peleus,” begun in 1872, was finished in 1881; the “Laus Veneris” was begun in 1873, but not finished till 1888.’ A still more notable instance is the ‘Briar Rose’ series, of which the first designs were made in 1869, while the finished pictures, which did not differ in any very striking way from the early drawings, were not exhibited till 1890.
Up to 1859 Burne-Jones and Morris practically lived and worked together, their home for some time from 1856 being some rooms at 17 Red Lion Square. Morris married in 1859, and next year went to live at Red House, Bexley Heath, a little ‘Palace of Art,’ as the friends called it, to which Burne-Jones contributed no small part of the decoration. In June 1860 he himself married Georgiana, one of the five daughters of the Rev. G. B. Macdonald, a Wesleyan minister, at that time of Manchester; of the remaining daughters one is Lady Poynter, while another is the wife of Mr. J. L. Kipling, and mother of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. For some time after his marriage Burne-Jones lived in Russell Place, Fitzroy Square, and afterwards in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury; in 1864 he migrated to Kensington Square, and three years later to the Grange, North End Road. West Kensington, where he continued to live for over thirty years, and where he died. It was at the Grange that all his great works were painted, or at least completed; for, as we have seen, many of the greatest of them had been planned in earlier days. But for several years after his establishment here Burne-Jones was hardly known at all to the world, even to the world of art. He exhibited small watercolours indeed in the rooms of the ‘Old’ Society, of which he had been elected an associate in 1863 (he withdrew from it for a time, in company with Sir Frederic Burton [q. v. Suppl.], many years later); but his oil pictures were not yet seen in public; his stained windows generally passed under
