On midsummer's eve 1898, a strange and melancholy watch took place in the parish church of Rottingdean in Sussex. The ashes of Edward Burne-Jones lay, in a plain oak casket, on his old drawing table in front of the altar, surrounded by four candles. Among those who took turns to sit beside them through the night before the funeral were his widow, his daughter and two of his nephews by marriage, Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. From the windows some of his most recognisable works, a squadron of great stained-glass angels, looked down. They were, Kipling felt, "much more him" than the ashes.
Still less true to the spirit of the quiet country church was the memorial service two days later in Westminster Abbey, at which another of Burne-Jones's relatives, his pompous brother-in-law, the artist Edward Poynter, took charge. Every inch the eminent Victorian, Poynter, as president of the Royal Academy (from which Burne-Jones had resigned), led a grieving nation in its tributes.
Yet both scenes said something about the enigmatic and not entirely likeable man they commemorated. As well as pre-Raphaelite sweetness and light there was, as Baldwin noticed, "iron and granite" in Burne-Jones, who, despite his belief in the value of art as a force for social unity, improved his name (from Jones) and took a baronetcy. He did this on the grounds that it would please his son, causing his old friend, the revolutionary socialist William Morris, to remark that he supposed "a man can be an ass for the sake of his children".
At the heart of the contrasts in his life and character, Fiona MacCarthy suggests in this thoughtful and sensitive account, there was a closely guarded kernel of self, a "citadel of the soul", as his long-suffering wife Georgiana described it, that nobody could penetrate. As a child, when his over-solicitous nurse wanted to know what he was thinking, Burne-Jones invariably answered "camels" and when, in his 40s, a model asked him about the oddly erotic painting of a mermaid then in progress in his studio, he told her it was a portrait of the dowager countess of Dorking.
One source of this self-protective isolation, MacCarthy writes, lay in the circumstances of his birth. Not long before he died, Burne-Jones wrote to one of his many female confidantes that he did not think it was "ever out of my mind what hurt I did when I was born". He was six days old when his mother died, leaving her only child alone with his father in a household characterised by "nervousness and gloom". Mr Jones, "a very poetical little fellow", as his son remembered him, spent the week making a precarious living as a picture framer and on Sundays took his son to spend long hours beside his mother's grave.
No wonder, perhaps, that Arthurian quests for unattainable love should have become such an enduring theme in Burne-Jones's work. But if MacCarthy is right to say that his life is "self-evident, embedded in the art", then there was, as she also argues, something much more ambivalent than yearning in the feelings about women and sex that he guarded in the citadel of his soul.
Burne-Jones worked his way out of his unhappy Birmingham childhood by study, arriving at Exeter College, Oxford at the same time as William Morris. Both expected to become clergymen, but as the afterglow of the Oxford Movement faded so did their faith, to be replaced by a love of art and architecture. Finally, one night on the quayside in Le Havre, after a walking tour of French cathedrals, they resolved to give up the church. Morris was to be an architect, Burne-Jones a painter. After that he drifted away from university without taking a degree and went to London, where his hero, soon his mentor, was the troubled moving spirit of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Rossetti introduced his acolyte to London life and in particular to the artistic set gathered around Sara Prinsep at Little Holland House, where intense young women in flowing dresses lay about languorously on lawns while intense young men – and some, like GF Watts, who were considerably older – drew them. Sara was one of the Pattle sisters, all beauties and each in her way brilliant, whom Ruskin described as looking like the "Elgin marbles with dark eyes". It was the look that became the Burne-Jones type.
Beside Rossetti's passionate auburn stunners, Burne-Jones's figures are marmoreal, still and, in some of his best-known works, literally in a state of suspense within the picture frame. The beggar maid who catches the eye of King Cophetua is perched uneasily halfway up the canvas, while in The Golden Stairs, the painting that became the quintessential aesthetic movement image, the procession of young women is frozen in perpetual descent.
Burne-Jones loved girls who were similarly poised between childhood and sexual maturity in a way that has made later generations feel queasy, but which among his contemporaries was by no means unusual. When Watts tried to adopt the teenage Ellen Terry, his fellow painter Spencer Stanhope objected that she was too old. Watts then suggested marrying her instead, to which Stanhope responded that she was too young. Watts did it anyway, with calamitous results. Burne-Jones preferred infatuation. A succession of "pets", as he called them, were the recipients of intense emotional outpourings and hand-holding. He was heartbroken when they married, and his furious reaction to his daughter Margaret's engagement was especially revealing. "What do girls want with men?" he demanded in a letter to Kipling, "didn't I flatter her enough, glare at her enough, fetch and carry and be abject enough!"
His view on one thing girls might want is suggested by his emphatic horror at anything that might count as "lust". Only once did this restraint, or repression, give way, in his extra-marital affair with the Greek beauty Maria Zambaco. The relationship lasted several years and ended in a hysterical scene outside Robert Browning's house. As Rossetti, who was more used to this sort of thing, told it, with a certain relish, Maria threatened to drink the laudanum she had brought with her before attempting to throw herself into the Regent's Canal and being wrestled to the ground by Burne-Jones just as the police arrived.
MacCarthy resists too much analysis of her subject's sexuality, leaving him mostly to speak for himself. This he did somewhat laconically in his 60s, when attempting to comfort Elfrida Ionides, whose husband had just left her, with the information that "men do that sort of thing". What he said to his wife is not possible to know, but the damage inflicted by the Zambaco affair was never quite repaired. He later reflected that Georgie would have been happier if he had never been born, adding sharply that then she could have married a "good clergyman" instead.
Georgie, strong-willed, strait-laced and Methodist by upbringing, stuck stoically and, some observers thought, foolishly by her husband while maintaining a considerable intellectual independence and finding outlets in social work and feminism, which irritated Burne-Jones. MacCarthy attempts to draw Georgie out from her husband's shadow, but it is not an easy task for she seems reluctant to be drawn. After Burne-Jones's death, the great project of Georgie's widowhood was her book of tactfully selective Memorials of Burne-Jones's life and work.
The relationship that MacCarthy depicts with most warmth and subtlety is the long attachment between Burne-Jones and Morris. They were complementary opposites, and Burne-Jones's mixed feelings of admiration, love and resentment were played out in the series of cartoons he drew of them, Burne-Jones always thin and feeble, Morris fat and energetic. Of their last collaboration, the Kelmscott Press edition of Chaucer, Burne-Jones wrote that it was the sort of book they had dreamed of long ago at Oxford: "we have made at the end of our days the very thing we would have made then if we could." For MacCarthy, too, who has written a monumental life of Morris, this magnificent and deeply felt biography brings with it a sense of completion, not least in its account of one of the greatest and most fruitful Victorian friendships.
Rosemary Hill's God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain is published by Penguin.
