Two of the most famous cycles of paintings by the 19th-century artist Edward Burne-Jones – one never completed, even though he caused his unfortunate client to rebuild part of his home to hold them – will be united for the first time in an exhibition at Tate Britain this autumn.
Although Burne-Jones’s dreamy-eyed maidens and muscular heroes in melancholy romantic settings became some of the best-loved paintings in British art and influenced generations of artists including Pablo Picasso, this will be the first large exhibition in London in decades and the first at the Tate since 1933, the centenary of his birth.
Burne-Jones loathed the impressionist painters – instead of capturing the moment he liked to brood over work in his studio for years or even decades – and he fell out of critical favour after his death in 1898.
However, the public never fell out of love with his work. Many works coming to the exhibition were sensations when first displayed. In 1890, thousands paid to see the Briar Rose cycle at Agnews gallery in London, and ever larger crowds descended when the paintings were shown for free at Toynbee Hall in the East End.
The Tate’s lead curator of British art to 1900, Alison Smith, said the artist’s work had contemporary resonance, partly because of the public’s renewed enthusiasm for fantasy. “Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones – those are pure Burne-Jones,” she said.
Although the exhibition will include stained glass and tapestry, many designed for his friend and fellow social reformer William Morris, as well as portraits, gifts he made for family and friends, and a piano painted inside and out with scenes from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the centrepiece will be some of his most ambitious projects, the Briar Rose and Perseus cycles of paintings.
The Briar Rose paintings – each almost 3 metres long, illustrating the fairytale with the artist’s daughter, Margaret, as Sleeping Beauty – are still in the house for which they were bought in 1890, Buscot Park in Oxfordshire.
For the first time they are being loaned with the decorative panels Burne-Jones created to link the paintings on the walls of the Georgian saloon.
The client for the Perseus cycle had a harder time: the 26-year-old MP and future prime minister Arthur Balfour was required to block up windows and change doors to make room for a 10-painting telling of the Greek hero Perseus’s rescue of Andromeda.
Though Burne-Jones took a meticulous approach, including having the monster that Perseus battles created as a full-scale wax model for his studio, the project was never completed. Smith said while there are photographs, she had been unable to trace the monster for the exhibition.
The four finished paintings are on loan from the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany, with 10 full-scale drawings showing the full grandeur of his plan arriving from Southampton City Art Gallery.
Smith said Burne-Jones decided to become an artist before he knew how to be one, abandoning theology studies at Oxford to become an apprentice to the pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
He was elected to the prestigious Society of Painters in Watercolour, but it disapproved of his thick paint and sombre colours instead of the light, translucent style of more typical English watercolourists.
In 1870, Phyllis and Demophoön, with its full-frontal male nude, was regarded as scandalous. Instead of agreeing to make the man more “respectable” with a flutter of drapery, Burne-Jones abandoned the society and became more closely associated with the pre-Raphaelite group and his friend Morris.
Many loans are from private collectors, including the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who is locked in battle with his neighbour Robbie Williams over development plans that could affect his antique-stuffed gothic mansion in Kensington, south-west London.
“People were really anxious to come on board,” Smith said. “We were offered more works than we could show. Maybe we should have had a second overflow exhibition.”
- The Edward Burne-Jones exhibition will be at Tate Britain in south-west London from 24 October until 24 February 2019.
